Main Engine Cut Off - T+93: NASA Goddard and Restore-L

Episode Date: September 13, 2018

Pat O. and I took a trip down to NASA Goddard to explore all that’s going on there. We talk a bit about our visit, what we saw and learned, and we talk with Brent Robertson, project manager of Restore-L, NASA’s satellite servicing mission. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, and eight anonymous—and 185 other supporters on Patreon. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center | NASA Global Precipitation Mission Near-Realtime Rainfall (Incredible rolling 7-day video of rainfall) Satellite Servicing Projects Division - Team Satellite Servicing Projects Division - Restore-L pat o. 🚀 (@spacepat_o) | Twitter Falcon Heavy Kerbal Camera Crew Reaction Vid - 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 the Main Engine Cut-Off. I'm Anthony Colangelo. This is the Road Edition of MECO, the second Road Edition. First one was 085 a year and a half ago, two years ago. I don't know. And I've got a friend here today. You may know him as rocketlaunch.live, Pat. You may know him as the guy that you hear in the executive producer segment of this podcast. That's right. You may know him as the guy that you met at the off-nominal meetup in March,

off nominal meetup in March or you were that guy in that video of Kerbal Space Academy losing their shit at Falcon Heavy landing. Do people see that? Yes. We're going to post that link in the show notes. Pat, how's it going? What's up, everybody? Good to be here. So we're on the road back from Goddard Space Flight Center.

We are on 95 here cruising around and took a little tour through Goddard Space Flight Center, saw some really interesting stuff and the main meat of it was that we went into the Satellite Servicing and Robotics Lab where they're working on Restore L, which is the mission that they're going to go up to Landsat 7, refuel it, what else are they going to do to it? Reposition it? Yep. And then maybe try out some things about fixing it? You'll hear about that in a little bit.

We talked to Brent Robertson, who is the project manager there, and so you'll hear our little chat with him at the end of the show. But we did tour through a bunch of other stuff at Goddard. What were your highlights, aside from the satellite servicing i gotta remember what we did know yeah i don't know that we ever got an actual name of that building but we went into that control area for uh where they're controlling a lot of the different weather monitoring satellites. Yep. So we had the Global Precipitation Monitoring, GPM is the name of it?

GPM. Global Precipitation Monitoring, I think it was. Then we had the Aura, Terra, and Aqua satellites that were all joint there. And then we had LRO is controlled out of there as well. And I'm probably missing one or two, but there was this whole control hallway that had about, they said, some amount of billions of work going on in there at any given moment. That was pretty awesome. We saw some downlink data from GPM.

We saw some, we were there shortly before LRO had its downlink time. General control nerdery, I would say. Yeah, I mean this is where the spacecraft are being flown from, essentially. I mean there's literally a hallway that you walk down that has on both sides things like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Control Center. There are people behind consoles that are looking at the data as it comes off of the spacecraft. I kind of forget how much is in there,

though. A lot of missions. Not a lot of people. Not today, anyway. It's amazing how few people are able to be at the helm of these multi-million dollar or billion dollar

spacecraft, in some cases. I didn't see if, there was a bunch of ICESat stuff up on the walls, but I didn't see if there was a control center there for ICESat, which is launching in like four days or whatever from Vandenberg. But I assume that's in there somewhere. And there was a couple other missions they talked about being nearby that we didn't particularly see. There's the Hubble control room at Goddard as well. But I feel like Goddard is probably either it or Ames

are the most underappreciated NASA centers, I would say. Nobody really thinks about how much is going on there. Let's see, what else did we see? We saw a lot of the vacuum chamber testing. Oh, we walked into the centrifuge that they have at Goddard, which kind of blew both of our minds for a minute. We got to put the picture. You took a panorama photo.

We got to put that out there for people to see. Yeah, so we had Travis, who was our tour guide today, and he was like, oh, I want to show you guys the centrifuge. So we're just walking around the high bay clean room, we saw that as well, where James Webb was just hanging out. And then he just walks us into this doorway and it's this like cavernous centrifuge facility

that I was not prepared for how large it was inside of that thing. And they use that for testing spacecraft elements or sometimes even entire spacecraft, testing the G-loads on it. He said that most recently they had James Webb components in there, but I don't know specifically what they were doing. And they're retro, I wouldn't, maybe not retro, but they for upgrading it so that it can mimic the loads

that are going to be seen in like Falcon Heavy, SLS launch, some of the bigger new launch vehicles out there. So I wouldn't be surprised to see some stuff heading through there. I don't know, he said it's going to be next year that it'll be back online, so maybe we'll take another trip down. He did say that when they start it, it's a gigawatt of power for like a microsecond to get this thing running and then two people pushed the centrifuge to get it started so i asked if pat and i could be those people next time uh he didn't seem thrilled about the question but he did not say no is what i would say oh we also saw that static mock-up of WFIRST. This was a full-scale, one-to-one of the WFIRST chassis, I would say.

People around there, there was a lot of WFIRST logos that I saw on the walls and everything, so they're pretty excited about WFIRST, and I heard from multiple different conversations that the idea with WFIRST is that more of it would be built and run by NASA themselves, not by a subcontractor for no apparent reason. There was no reason that they would do that, make that decision to change the next space telescope. And then we did walk through some of the high bays and clean rooms that James Webb, and we didn't walk into the clean room, don't worry, it's still clean. I saw some of the high bays where James Webb used to sit.

You saw it when it was actually there a couple of months back. I did, in all its glory. But that is now out at Redondo Beach, I think it is still, where they're shaking the bolts off it and stuff. I don't know. Still an engineering article there, so I kind of got to sense a little bit of the scale of that thing, which is cool. But that's James Webb. We don't need to go too much into it.

Well, they say it's the largest clean room of its class in the United States and possibly the world. So the clean room itself is a sight to be seen on its own. It was. It had like a vehicle assembly building vibe to it the proportions of it you know the uh general shape of it which now that i am thinking about that that is a ridiculously large clean room so that's cool i don't know what's going through there next um but whatever it is i think i'll take a trip down to see what it is because it's pretty special to see something in there.

There was a... so let's talk maybe a little bit about the satellite servicing, just Restore-L stuff, before we talk to Brent. We saw a lot of hardware that we couldn't take pictures of a lot of things, because they're working out a lot of these components. And as you hear in the interview, the idea here is that NASA at Goddard is developing the payload technologies that will fly on the Restore-L bus. So they're sourcing the bus from SSL and building the components. So we saw robotic arms and capture mechanisms and tool mechanisms, fuel valves that they're testing. What was your favorite of the toys that we experienced in there? I mean, I think it's cool that they are looking ahead and trying to develop a common fuel valve, trying to standardize so that spacecraft in the future can be serviced more easily because, as you'll hear, they have to go through a lot to

get into Landsat 7 because it's not designed to to be serviced so that was cool I think I think that's just I think I was cool to see I didn't realize that they were actually gonna be using the same fuel valves that it was originally fueled with like they're literally going to have this robot cut into the blankets and unscrew the caps from the fuel valves that are on the spacecraft and then he was i think he talks about this interview but he was talking about how they have to unscrew these fuel caps and then uh catch them before they float away so that they can screw them back on later. So I didn't really, I don't know, I heard other things about how to refuel satellites that weren't ready to be refueled, and none of them said make a robot that can unscrew fuel caps to refuel them.

So that was kind of mind-blowing. The manipulator system on Restore L obviously these were like engineering models so I don't think we saw every little detail and I know they did put a lot away before we even entered the room there's a lot going on on that little manipulator there's like four or five different tools that I could see visibly

I'm sure there's a lot more than that on there so that's kind of amazing yet terrifying that there's that much complexity in this little manipulator system. But it's very cool to see the mock-ups that they have. They have a mock-up of Landsat 7 in there that they're testing on. They have mock-ups of the capture mechanisms that they're going to test on, fuel valves that i'm talking about so they they have this entire like simulation area complete with these workstations that were like what was it eight monitors so there's workstations with joysticks and keyboards uh really cool to see like where people work on this kind of stuff so that's uh pretty special i don't know if there's anything else that you want to get into before we get into the interview.

I'm sorry? But before we do, we do need to say a big thank you to everybody who supports at patreon.com slash Miko. Pat right here sitting next to me is one of them. But since he's with me, he's going to read the list for tonight of these people who produced this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. This episode of Main Engine Cutoff was supported by 221 patrons and 36 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Maurice, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, and eight anonymous producers.

Thank you. Isn't that hard? That's harder than it sounds, right? It's pretty hard. I lost my breath. Thank you guys so much for supporting this episode. You make trips like this possible, as well as Pat. Oh, this is another thing. Everybody head over to Twitter, twitter.com slash spacepat underscore o. That's right, right. That's right.

Tweet at him and say thank you for getting us into Goddard Space Flight Center. Because Pat made this happen. It's Travis. Travis is a good friend of mine, and all thanks should go to him. Well, this was a team effort. And all of you out there at patreon.com slash miko helped as well. So thank you. With that, let's get into the interview, and I hope you enjoy.

All right, we're here with Brent Robertson in the Satellite Servicing Robotics Lab. We're looking at Restore-L hardware all around us, Landsat 7 mock-up over there. Could you tell us a little bit about Restore-L, both the mission in general and then where things are at today, timeline, that sort of overview? Yeah, sure. So Restore-L is a satellite servicing mission. We're going to demonstrate satellite servicing of what we call legacy satellite, a satellite that hasn't been designed to be serviced. Restore-L is going to rendezvous with that satellite, inspect that satellite, capture that satellite, and then we have two robot arms on our mission that we will use to service,

perform tele-operated servicing of that satellite, including refueling. You know, because this satellite wasn't designed to be serviced, we have to do a number of operations, including, you know, because this satellite wasn't designed to be serviced, we have to do a number of operations, including, you know, cutting MLI blanket away to get to the fill and drain valves, cutting wires, unscrewing valves. So it's a fairly complicated set of operations we need to do. But we're currently in development. You know, the technologies required to do this mission are nearing completion right now. We've had our preliminary design review last year.

We're working towards coming up with a critical design review. This spring we'll have our mission critical design review. So, you know, we're in the midst of testing our engineering hardware, getting ready for this mission. We plan to launch it in 2022. And is the flight hardware still yet to be fabricated, or is that somewhere else being worked on? Well, in some cases, some of this flight hardware, we have long lead procurement times. In some cases, it takes a year from receipt of order to actually receipt of the hardware. So in many cases, we've bought parts, flight parts already.

We haven't assembled those flight parts yet, but we've bought many of the parts that need to be assembled. And in some cases, we contract with various industry for components, for cameras. In some cases, they've started assembly of those flight cameras already. And I assume launch is in the same kind of spot where it's not yet been contracted out, but is that going to be the NASA Launch Services Program, something in that vein? Yes, we're planning to use the Launch Services Program provided by Kennedy Space Center to procure a launch vehicle. The launch vehicle hasn't been procured.

We will be launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base, but it's yet to be determined what rocket we'll be riding on. One thing Pat was curious about, we were talking on the way down here, was how Landsat 7 was chosen as the target. There was maybe something going on behind the scenes decision there, or is it just that it's an older satellite that is a good target? Yeah, I mean, basically, you know, we will be demonstrating satellite servicing for the first time, many things for the first time. You know, we'd be refueling a satellite for the first time.

We'll be capturing a satellite that wasn't designed to be captured. So you don't necessarily want to practice that, doing that on a live satellite, right, one that's still producing data. So Landsat 7 was basically chosen because it's nearing its end of life, it's running out of fuel, and it is a good representative satellite of other satellites. It has a standard Marmon ring interface that many other satellites have. So it was chosen for those reasons. Could you talk a little about that capture mechanism, so people can visualize how that's going to work, where things are positioned,

how it will grapple onto it, that attachment mechanism? The capture is actually one of our most complicated operations that we have to do on Restore-L. complicated operations that we have to do on Restore-L. So we actually, you know, we rendezvous with Landsat 7, we'll come closer, we approach Landsat 7, and that's all ground controlled, but at some point when we get about one and a half meter deck to deck separation, you know, we're ready to capture it, and due to the delay in space-to-ground delay, we can no longer control that on the ground. So the spacecraft has to be smart enough to perform that operation autonomously.

So once we give the go for grapple, the spacecraft will approach the remaining distance to Landsat 7, reach out with one of its arms, and grapple the Marmon ring. So that's the interface that Landsat 7 had with the launch vehicle. All satellites have some interface with their launch vehicle. Landsat 7 has a Marmon ring. And you can think of it as just a ring going around at the back end of the satellite. We have a gripper tool that will be attached to the end of our

robot arm. And as we reach out with that gripper tool, we have to grip that Marmon ring within seconds of making contact with the Landsat 7 Marmon ring. As you can imagine, in space, as you touch something, it's not going to stay in place. It's going to move away from you because you're actually pushing it away. So we push through the grapple. As we reach and make contact with the Landsat 7 Marmon ring, we'll push through and then grapple within seconds to capture it. Back to Landsat 7 as far as, you know, I know that it's got the scanline converter issue. It kind of brings up a different question.

Is there any opportunity to use something like Restore-L or whatever might come after Restore-L to repair broken satellites? Yes, exactly. And does that have anything to do with Landsat 7? Yeah, you know, I'd say the satellite servicing is really in its infancy as far as seeing the benefits of satellite servicing. You know, NASA's working on a mission, Restore-L. DARPA's working on a mission. Industry, there's commercial efforts ongoing to provide satellite servicing. We have a lot of capability on Restore-L where, you know, we can service Landsat 7, but we can do other things with robots in space, right?

You can think of, of course, we have the ability to inspect satellites. So we can approach satellites if a satellite has something wrong with it. Say an antenna didn't deploy for some reason. We can inspect and understand what happened to that satellite. Then we have robot manipulators. We can potentially resolve an anomaly. We can unstick antennas with our robot arms. We can grapple that satellite and unstick things with the other robot arm. We can replace components on satellites. So satellite servicing allows you to not only repair things, but you could imagine bringing up a component

and replacing an older unit or a failed unit on a satellite. You know, these satellites are very expensive. Launching a satellite is very expensive. So people are realizing there's a business case commercially for prolonging the life of these very expensive satellites, either repairing them or prolonging their life. And then there's other areas, too, that satellite servicing can enable. You can think of orbital debris as a big problem in space right now, right?

Well, we have the capability to capture things and deorbit them, right? So you can think of, well, maybe in the future we're going to have, you know, a number of satellite servicers in space just taking care of that orbital debris problem for us. in space just taking care of that orbital degree problem for us. And then other things you can think of, you know, most missions are, or all missions today are limited by the launch vehicle fairing size, right? You can only fit as much into that launch vehicle fairing. That's what you're going to launch. That's what you're going to operate.

Well, now if you have robots in space, you can think of, well, hey, I can have multiple launches and I can assemble things in space, right? I can build bigger things, much bigger than are limited by the launch vehicle fairing. So it enables new missions, new mission concepts. The fueling interfaces that we saw a little display of seems like a little bit of a trouble spot on this mission as well because it seems pretty complex. This was not something they were thinking of back in the 90s. So what's going on there with the fueling interface, both for Restore-L but maybe in the future as well, what you would like to see be done differently?

Sure, yeah. Well, for Restore-L, we're demonstrating that we can refuel a satellite that was not designed to be serviced, a legacy satellite, right? And it involves a fair amount of complicated operations. You know, there's thermal blanketing, MLI blanketing, covering up the valve area that we have to access. So we have to actually cut away blankets in space. We have to fly a tool that cuts blankets, right? We have to have another tool that holds that blanket in place while we perform operations. There's wires holding those fill and drain valve caps on,

so we have to cut wires. So we have to fly another tool to cut those wires. And then we have to unscrew those caps. And there's actually two caps that you unscrew. When you unscrew those caps, you have to make sure that you can't let them float away in space. So you have to capture them as you unscrew them. So there's a variety of, you know, fairly complicated tools that we are flying on this mission to allow us to do all of these operations. And we'll demonstrate we can do that for these legacy satellites. But you can think of in the future, you know, we've developed here in the satellite servicing projects division cooperative aids. So from as simple as flying a satellite with a pattern, if we did a shield or a pattern that a robot camera can recognize

and allow it to approach a satellite more easily to something, flying hardware, where you could fly what we have, a cooperative service valve. So that's a valve that allows you, it's a robot, basically a robot-friendly valve. It allows you to approach that valve. There would be no MLI blanketing needed to cover that valve. And it flies basically a quick disconnect, so we'd be able to very quickly, with one tool, refuel that satellite with one tool so it's just like what's on our cars yeah you know an interface that's just it just a common

interface would simplify things so people are thinking about that it's something that we we promote we we develop these technologies and then we we allow industry you know anybody can apply for a license to build these things. We transfer the technology to industry, not after the mission's done, but while we're building the mission. We develop these technologies, and we have a number of, we're very active in transferring and showing the technologies we're developing and transferring it to U.S. industry. Would those be applicable to spacecraft themselves,

or even maybe launch vehicle stages, like an upper stage or something like that that could be refueled? Is it something that could be used in both ways or just really the bus? Yeah, I mean, you can think of upper stages are basically spacecraft as well, right? So, yes, yes. So there's no particular fuel requirements on that? Well, there's different fuel. Different fuels are used. You know, we're demonstrating fuel transfer of hydrazine with Restore-L.

We have another mission here in Satellite Servicing Projects Division that the robotic refueling mission, RRM-3, will demonstrate storage and fluid transfer of cryogenic fluids. So we're looking at various fluids and the complexities of transferring those fluids in space. What can you tell us about, you guys have, I believe, some hardware that's on the ISS currently? Yes. And then I know that you have some with RRM-3 going up soon as well.

Can you talk about both of those? Yeah. about both of those? Yeah, so we build upon the satellite servicing. Certainly we have the technologies today to do satellite servicing, but we build upon basically the work done by others. So you think back to Hubble Space Telescope, the servicing of that by astronauts, the tools developed for that servicing of Hubble Space Telescope, that tool development is done by the same people

that are in this division today working on Restore-L. So we build upon that experience, those technologies. We have another mission, Raven, that's currently flying on Space Station. It was launched a couple years ago. It's an attached payload. And it images all of the cargo supply missions that come to resupply space station.

Anything approaching space station is imaged by that Raven. So it has cameras, it has the algorithms required to do relative navigation computation as those spacecraft approach. And we use the same type of vision, cameras, and algorithms for satellite servicing missions such as Restore-L. So we certainly build upon previous missions. You also mentioned that the part of Restore-L is going to reposition Landsat 7 as well, that it's going to change its orbit.

What are the details on that? Yeah, so again, you can think of if you capture a satellite, we fly a lot of fuel on Restore-L. So we have the capability, once it's captured, we actually capture it with an arm and then we birth it onto a birthing mechanism. So we have three posts that capture the Marmon ring interface of Landsat 7 to make a rigid connection between us and Landsat 7. And then we're basically in control of that satellite.

So we use our propulsion system to boost the orbit of Landsat 7. Again, and we could do this to any satellite, right? And you could potentially give a satellite years of life by doing just that one orbital adjustment maneuver. Even without refueling itself. Even without refueling, yes. There's a lot of different mission concepts. You know, you can, we're going to demonstrate refueling. Other mission concepts are you just actually attach yourself to a satellite and provide the orbit adjust capability for that satellite.

And that's what now Northrop Grumman is working on with the mission extension vehicle. Yep, exactly. Do you have any interaction with that team? We do. We do. You know, again, we transfer our technologies to industry, so we're actively talking with Northrop Grumman, with other industry leaders that are working on satellite missions. We make our robot technology available to them

so they can use it for their missions. We collaborate with DARPA, who's also working on a satellite servicing mission in GEO. So we're active in promoting the technologies. You know, NASA doesn't want to be in the business of servicing commercial satellites, right? We want to promote this industry, but we really want to see commercial industry take this over. And, you know, it's apparent that it's going to happen, right? We have Space Systems RAL working on missions.

They're working with us. They're working on their own missions. Northrop Grumman, we have European commercial efforts and startups. You know, we'll be one of the first missions to perform satellite servicing, but it's going to become the norm, you know, in the next decade. Restore L, after it finishes Landsat 7, is there any projected mission beyond that, or is that yet to be seen without those? Yeah, right now NASA has not determined what we'll do with Restore-L.

We have a lot of capability. As I said, you know, we can do anything from we could demonstrate in-space assembly with Restore-L. You know, you can think of, for instance, you could, what we're talking about, a persistent platform, right? You launch something else, and maybe it comes up with a tool, right? And Restore.io goes, rendezvous with that, says, oh, thanks for that tool. I needed that tool to help assemble you. So I'll grab that tool and assemble what was launched. And then something else comes up, and we rendezvous with that, and we assemble it.

So that could be done with Restore-L. Or we could go, you know, do the same type of thing we're doing with Landsat 7 to other satellites. So does Restore-L have cooperative fueling valves on it itself? We do have cooperative servicing valves on it to allow us to refuel the hydrazine, yes. The camera units on Restore-L, even that alone is kind of an interesting service to be able to inspect satellites. Yes. Maybe, you know, somebody calls you up and say, hey, something happened to my satellite. I don't know what exactly. Yeah. Do you see that as something that could be a viable service?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, again, some of these satellites are high value, right? Billion dollars, excessive of billion dollars to build that satellite, to launch that satellite. And basically, the norm to date has been you launch something, it operates in space, and you have one chance to make it work. And basically it's got to work when it gets into space. Well, this is kind of breaking the paradigm. Having satellite servicing allows you to, if there's something wrong, you know, now all of a sudden you can take that satellite service vehicle, this robot in space, and understand what happened in space. Do the inspection.

Do the anomaly resolution activity. So certainly I could see that happening as well. One last question I have is how you ended up here. is how you ended up here. I'm curious about, was this something that you've always been interested in or you've kind of, you know, as the industry has headed this way, you were like, oh, that would be a fun project to latch on to? Yeah, you know, I just love working at NASA, right? I love building things. I love managing things.

I love working on things and getting to see things launch. So I've worked on a number of scientific missions. You know, this will be my first robotic servicing mission. It This will be my first robotic servicing mission. It will be NASA's first robotic servicing mission. So I'm just blessed to be part of this, and I just think I have a real cool job. We do too. That's why we're here. All right, well, thank you so much for chatting with us. Sure.

So that's it for us today. Thank you again to everybody at Goddard Space Flight Center who had us down there. Thanks to Brent for spending some time with us talking about Restore L. Thanks to Travis for showing us around, and thanks Pat for getting us in there and for being my travel buddy. So that is it for this week. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week. Take it easy, everybody. Thank you.