Off-Nominal - 112 - Big Microgravity

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Grant Bonin to talk about his new venture, gravityLab, focused on partial gravity research.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 112 - Big Microgravity (with Grant Bonin) - YouTubegravityLab — Accelerating Life Off-PlanetSept. 14, 1966 - Gemini XI Artificial Gravity Experiment | NASAWanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist - YouTubeProbodobodyne QBE - Kerbal Space Program WikiFollow GrantGrant Bonin (@grantbonin) / TwitterFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey there, Jake. How's it going? Hey, man, how's it going? Oh, double talk. Double talk. I'm talking to your charge there. I heard you're hot.

Yeah, last week I was on fire, and this week you're in a heat wave. What's going on here? Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I would call this my first legit Mexican heat wave. It's gotten a couple days here and there where it popped up and then came back down, but this is like a week and a week and a half straight of, well, we're hitting 40 every day, 40 Celsius. So, what's that was that with one and 12? 12, 11 15 Fahrenheit-ish.

And it's just, yeah, it's brutal, man. And I'm getting all this solar panel stuff done. And so today we had the power off because they were redoing the meter. We had power off for an hour, an hour without AC at noon. And it was brutal. Like, it was just like immediately unbearable. I'm sensing some chaotic energy from you today. And now I understand why.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like, bleu. So, yeah, I'm excited to, you know, get through this. It's unlike the climate in the other corner of this trio here, Grant. Welcome to Off Nominal. This is your first time on this show, right? It is, yeah. It's really unacceptable from our perspective.

Well, here we are. Well, sorry, what's unacceptable that I'm here now? That you haven't been here until now. That you are here at all. I was just mortified by the intro temperature story because here in Seattle, it's like a balmy, 65 degrees and sunny right now. the other 40. The weather in the summer and no state income taxes are like the two best kept secrets of Washington. And I guess I've just unveiled.

But I was in Hawaii for a week with my wife celebrating our one year anniversary. And it was like, you know, 70 something and humid. And I was just wilting. Like I've lost all ability to tolerate weather that is outside of the 60 to like 7. kind of grand zone, we'll call it. And I'm Canadian, so I should be, you know, able to at least tolerate something colder, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

Yeah, yeah. I've acclimated completely, like, I don't think I would go home in the winter if my family, like, hey, come home for Christmas, not happening. Not going to do it, no. Once it gets below, like, 20, 25 degrees Celsius, I'm just like, this is too much for me. Like, I can't do it.

Also, I note that. you measure things in Celsius, I converted to Fahrenheit very quickly after I moved to the States because it's the most, I think, like 70 degrees. Okay, I'm 70% hot. That's the best. It's the best system. Okay, I'm 100% hot. Zero. I'm dead. But every other temperature, it's 100 degrees dead. Like Celsius, 100 degrees, dead. Rankin, 100 degrees. Calvian. It's a fair argument. Fahrenheit is four up. It's livable. It's fair. It's a fair argument. for an otherwise terrible measurement system. But I've deleted 50% of your listeners.

I don't know. Actually, we've taken a lot of controversial stances, and I don't know at all where the anomalies land on the correct temperature scale argument. It's interesting to find out what hills people will die on. Yeah. Let's find out. Hit us up. Blow up our Discord and or Twitter and or Mastodon. Jake, what are you drinking? Just water, ice water?

Real simple today. I'm not fancy today. A small beer brand. Yeah. Unknown around here. I don't know if you've heard of those atis. I've been doing this a lot today just to keep it, you know. Not everyone is slowly dying in heat wave, but those wilds and stuff.

Exactly. So yeah, cheers. What do you guys got? Oh, Grant's got a Detroit Lions coffee, I think. It might not be coffee. It was hot apple cider, now it's cold apple cider, but it's, um, um, the important thing is, of course, the mug. Um, actually, I'll give a shout out to a buddy of mine, old college buddy of mine, uh, named Adam Philip in Toronto, it works at MDA. And he said that because you're a Detroit Lions fan, it contextualizes everything else that you care about.

It's like, what are the things you want to see happen in your lifetime? And I said, well, I want to substance and contribute to the human settlement of space. and I want to see the Detroit Lions win a Super Bowl. And he's like, oh, cool, yeah, tell me more about that space settlement thing. It's a reminder of priorities and for me, I guess. As long as you one day unveil the Barry Sanders station somewhere in orbit, then I'm here for that. Sorry, this is not a football podcast, but if you wanted it to be, I met Barry Sanders when I was, geez, I was 11 in an elevator. and it was like coolest moment possible.

That was probably prime Barry Sanders time too. It was, yeah. That was the year they took. It used to be the NFC Central, now it's the NFC North, but it was the year that they won the division championship, and I think Eric Kramer was a quarterback. Yeah, it was a good year. Jake, have you ever heard of Barry Sanders?

No. Not even one bit. That's unfortunate. I like Google it or YouTube it and enjoy 10 minutes of watching a CECHA. super human being, a person move like no human being has any business moving. Jake, it's worth it. All right.

I'll take your word for it. I'll take your word for it. I just want to alert you that I'm made a ginatonic today. And I wasn't really looking when I poured it. And I haven't put any tonic in this yet. Oh. That'll be good. Thank you again for having me.

Appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. Cheers. We're happy to have you. Yeah. So me, we, okay, we've kind of been chatting, you know, the three of us here and there for a while. You've been all over the place doing different kinds of super interesting work, which is, you know, a big reason that we wanted to have you on because we just like talking to people

that do interesting things in space. And so, but now you've got, I mean, tell us about what you're doing now. You've got your own company now, it looks like. So tell us about gravity lab and what kind of stuff you're doing because this is, this is, I don't, I think we, Anthony, we've been talking about artificial gravity here and there for a long time and why there needs to be more people doing it. Well, here we are. So this is good to see. So yeah. Tell us about it, Grant. Well, that's actually a really great segue because we have been talking about it for a very long time.

Not a lot of people have done anything about it. So there's a long version and a short version of this. I'm kind of interested in what your level of interest is in the long version, but I'll try to start succinctly. Gravity Lab is a company that I co-founded with Chris Lewicki around a year ago or so, and it's dedicated to understanding whether or not there are limits to how effectively we can adapt to partial gravity environments.

So, you know, we're in a situation where we know from decades of human spaceflight that zero-g, zero gravity is terrible for human physiology. And the three of us plus others, billions of others, are the existence proof that one-earth gravity is good. I mean, there's a reason this is our favorite planet where we keep all our stuff. but we don't know anything about what the curve that connects zero G and 1G looks like. Anecdotally from relatively simplistic experiments down in station in particular, we know that life does strange things between 0G and 1G,

but it's not been exhaustively explored. And this is a question of powerful significance to human space settlement. If there's a gravity threshold below which human beings can't effectively, reproduce if we can't have babies, or even if we can't grow Matt Damon's potato on Mars, or we can't firefight effectively on the moon. There are all these weird esoteric problems associated with gravity, and we shouldn't solve them the hard way. And so from my standpoint, and it stands, I think, a little bit in contrast as some of the other awesome companies that are looking at gravity stuff. You know, from my standpoint, there's there's just a lot of risk reduction work that wants to be done.

And the cool thing from a business ownership standpoint is that the platform that, you know, we're building to try to knock out some, try to answer some of these questions. Also allows you to manufacture things that nobody's thought about before. You've certainly seen the well, the groundswell of interest in zero-g manufacturing. And, you know, and again, in 1G, we manufacture a lot of things. It's our favorite planet's where we build all our stuff. But if you can dynamically control your level of gravity through a fabrication process, you can, you know, decide how much up and down you have at any given moment and can introduce interesting, unique properties into something you're manufacturing, introduce anisotropi,

or even just use gravity for, you know, finishing steps. That's really powerful, too. So Gravity Lab really exists for purpose of creating a platform to understand if life can function in partial gravity environments and use the same platform to make things that we can't make and haven't even thought about making yet in either a zero-g or a one-g environment. And the same set of spacecraft are intended to serve both applications. And the joke that I made a second ago was that we've been talking about this for a long time. It was almost 20 years ago that I wanted to do, I was going to go do a PhD in bioastronautics because I cared about, it wasn't the rhetoric at the time, but it was the, you know, if millions of people are going to live and work in space, we get out babies.

We didn't know if we get up babies in fractional gravity environments. So I was going to go do a PhD in that. But then a person who became one of my best buddies, Daniel Faber, who's the CEO at Orbit Fab, convinced me over a beer that you can't call yourself an aerospace engineer if you don't put things in air in space. So you should go cut your teeth and build some stuff first. And then I fell in love with microsatellites. And then, you know, weight leads underway kind of thing. And then one day I wake up and I'm a microsatellite guy. And that one day was, yeah, like a year and a half ago or something like that.

And I said, there is one problem. We talk so much in human spaceflight about how do you get there, that we don't, that we tend to neglect the, how do you stay there part? And I was, I've been concerned about that for 20 years in the back of my head. So, you know, you have your classic midlife crisis and you say, what am I doing with my time? I should be solving the most important problem that's on my mind. Should we make babies in space is what your original answer was to that question. Well, I mean, we, yeah, as it depends on, and this podcast airs, we can go multiple different directions with this.

But, yeah, you know, at the end of the day, we're talking about enjoying high quality of life in space. Then it has to be, life in space has to be as rich as it is terrestrily. And I agree with a lot of the, the work that we're most vibrant when we're, you know, poking at the thundering uncertainties of the unknown, rather than challenging the harmless nuances of what's already been done. All that rhetoric is great, but you've got to come home to something that gives you satisfaction. And you've got to be building for a future generation. That future generation has to actually be able to be had and raised and cultivated.

If we find out, for example, that below one-third earth gravity, it's extremely difficult to have children. It's not to say that it's an unsolvable problem. We just need to know we have a problem in the first place, but that'll powerfully steer us in a direction that might be more Elon Musk or Bob Zubrim, Mars is the future for humankind. If we find that there is no meaningful threshold, the threshold is doable, then all destinations are open for business.

And the moon looks interesting, not just for an outpost, but for multi-generational life, all other issues notwithstanding. If we find that everything is terrible below, you know, a half an Earth G, then suddenly we're steered towards a more O'Neillian future. And there's no, there's no mundane answer to this question. So let's get out there and solve it. Like, what is the gravity prescription for life? And then even that, like, can you do, like, can there be gravity treatment on these lower G areas where, like, maybe once a week you get, like, a gravity treatment? and that that helps keep things moving enough that it's all right?

Like there's even from that point, there's a million branching questions to ask too. Oh, yeah. And this is what's cool about it. And Chris Lovicki and I used to joke that, you know, every question is a really deep root system, which from the standpoint of a venture-backed company means that there's all sorts of opportunity. You don't usually do one mission. It usually leads to multiple missions.

And, you know, that's what we're going to. anticipate with Gravity Lab, step one for us is to get initial heritage. I guess we'll come to that in a few minutes or whenever. But yeah, and then the whole, and then the other thing I think that shaped the thinking and resulted in us building the company that exists today is that we didn't want multiple miracles to have in order to start tackling this problem. Kind of the rhetoric that we used a lot was single digit millions, single digit years to get anybody. up to do a partial gravity experiment. That's like a founding philosophy behind the company.

I don't want to have to raise money and raise money and raise money. The money's hard. And I've got to do some more of it. I'm trying to do some more of it. But it's not insurmountable. Whereas if I was trying to tackle this as a builder of a space station, I'd be in that cycle for a very, very long time. So I don't want to do something that's going to cost me hundreds of billions or a billion dollars.

I want to do something that is within my skill set that I know exactly how to do, and I can do it in 18 to 24 months from order to orbit from any particular customer. We've told sometimes that we're victims of our own pragmatism, but so be it, if that's the worst thing that's able to be. I'm going to ask this, though. Okay, so, I mean, it seems obvious to us that this needs to be a, like, this is a problem we have to solve. So why has it taken this long to get like any kind of appreciable interest in, you know,

I know we have little centrifuges on ISS and stuff and we're doing little micro ones here. But it feels to me like this should have been like a pretty high priority question. I mean, coming out of NASA like in the 70s, 80s at some point, like they should have been like, okay, well, now we're thinking about bigger things and we need to understand stuff. Like NASA is all about risk reduction. Why wouldn't they want to send like hundreds of these little things up to do little artificial gravities and answer some of these questions? I mean, even if Apollo continued a little bit, they would have had to figure it out in the 70s because they would have been staying on the moon for a long period of time. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So is there some blocker to this that I don't know about or?

Well, first of all, I like the way you think. So fist pump for sure. But I think, you know, it's a damn fun question. It's not that it hasn't been thought of. It's not that it hasn't been thought of. It's not that hasn't been studied. I was 20 years ago. You know, the Mars, geez, I should know the names of these things off the top of my head. It was the Mars Biogravity Satellite Project was looking at using mice as model organisms in a rotating system on a tether. And that's probably, that's probably closest to what we're envisioning, though there are reasons why we wouldn't do the tethers. But I thought you were going to say mice. I was like, I can't wait to hear this. We can't talk about mice if you want to because that that is important. But, you know, Erica Wagner from Blue Origin did her PhD thesis looking at this. I think there were a few others. If I recall correctly,

and if I don't, then my apologies. But it's been thought of for a long time. I guess my take on it and take that with a grain of salt is really just that it's almost like there was this space of zero G, we must understand how to survive in zero G. And it became in the words of Pete Warden, a self-flicking ice cream cone. And nobody was out of it. If you go back and read some popular science by Bob Zuberin, actually, Case for Mars, which I think he wrote in, I want to say early 90s, like 1992, 93. Right in the prime of Barry Sanders years.

Like just Zuberin was on fire the same time. Sanders was, yeah. Was, I don't want to say he was in his prime because I really enjoyed his last book. But he certainly making moves on the street. And the kind of cool thing was, he was like throwing up his hands in words saying, it is ridiculous to subject astronauts to this punishment. If you're flying to Mars and you have a high energy upper stage that's thrown you on your trans-Mars injection, then once you're done with it, it's dead weight.

it off on a big string and get spinning end over end like a pendulum and generate a Mars equivalent gravity or better for the astronauts to either acclimate down to Mars or enjoy a 1G type environment. By the way, if it fails, you can cut it loose and then you're kind of back to square one. But why do we accept the premise that we have to come? Why do we accept the premise that zero G or 1G is really kind of the only set of circumstances that we should be worried about, especially when we talk. But we weren't really talking about living and working in space. We were talking about sorties.

There wasn't, I mean, there have been a lot of false starts with lunar and Mars exploration, but it does feel like the last decade or so, please correct me if you think I'm wrong, it does feel like the conversation is meaningfully changed to being about industrialization and settlement. You know, when we were talking about human exploration for the longest time, Exploration doesn't ensure settlement in any particular way. It's valuable. But settlement is the goal that includes all other goals.

And that is really what we're talking about, I think, for the people who drink the human future in space Kool-Aid. And I do a lot. But it didn't feel like that conversation changed until the last decade or two. But yeah, now that we're very much in the headspace of we want people to go to space to stay. You know, for a very long time, yeah, you can access centerfuge resources. You could access centrifuge resources on station.

But the experiment volumes you would get are very small. The durations are very transient. Not really suitable for the long-term. Jake's out of here. You're coming in my prime slot here, Grant. Oh, okay. Hi, Jake. I guess I hope it doesn't reflect the water.

No, he's on Starlink. He probably just, he got it, he got toasted. a Starlink is roasted by the heatwave. Anyway. I was going to say, I hope that would reflect the broader user reaction to my comments. But no, so, you know, there have been small experiments done at small scale

for short durations on station to look at this, and it's really just opened up the can of worms on, wow, there's so much we don't understand about fractional gravity environments. But if I knew the answer, to the question of why this hasn't been done at the microsatellite scale yet. I think that people in general in the community might not be socialized to the idea that you can do extremely high-quality science in a small spacecraft.

And the joke that we make about what Gravity Lab is doing is that they're the world's smallest space stations. They're small enough to be affordable. But they're big enough to offer substantial volume for a user to experiment in and a substantial amount of time and a large degree of customization. And those aren't really things that you could have done easily up until recently. And when I say that, the reason I say that is also because right now we see this, this broad commoditization of a lot of spacecraft hardware. You know, if I wanted to make Gravity Lab as a business 10 years ago, I probably would have had to

become a vertically integrated spacecraft shop first. But now, I'm fortunate enough. I'm privileged enough that I can go out and work with an industry partner on essentially what is a commodity bus. I can rely on my network of suppliers to build the things that they're used to put into the marketplace. I don't have to worry about that. And that lets me hyper focus on developing the tech that is unique to my business, that is enabling for my business, and have partnerships that round out the rest. You really couldn't set up that kind of network.

I don't think a decade ago. A decade ago, I was building small spacecraft. You were doing the fundamental tech a decade ago, so yeah. I couldn't buy half of what I wanted now. And I'll be straightforward for the satellite side of things. We're working most closely with Astro Digital for initial missions, and they've been wildly successful with what they've put into space. And I've done missions with them across three different companies for myself.

You also have a speed of trust factor. There are a lot of things that go into it. All of a sudden, I can kick back and say, okay, well, this is commoditized. This is commoditized. SpaceX has done a great job at commoditizing ride share or maturing the ride share set of offerings that people can have. So, you know, if I need a dedicated launch, I know I can go to Rocket Lab. I know what the pricing is like. If I'm cool with ride share, I know I can go to SpaceX.

I know what the pricing looks like. This stuff doesn't move a lot. It moves around a little bit, not a lot. lot. Yeah. So suddenly I can say to myself, there's a huge amount of risk that's taken off the table by established providers. Here are the nuts and bolts that are critical IP to my company. I'm only going to focus on that. I can keep my team extremely small. I don't have any model that projects growing Gravity Lab to more than 10 people beyond a couple of years, at least, though we are hiring. So this is a good point to say, get me at grant at GravityLabspace.com.

But that's an interesting thing to note, though, because you're right that if you started and you had to develop all that fundamental tech, like, how far into your development would you be by the time that you're able to take advantage all this stuff? You'd be far enough in that you'd say, like, I've already done all this work. You would like sunk cost foul to yourself into finishing the stuff that you started rather than scrapping the team that you've built to build all the fundamental tech and then just go on the, you know, the track that you're on now to say, like, let me just build the stuff that's unique to me. So that is an interesting moment to look at and think about, you know, the people that aren't putting themselves out there of the company that they started and they're thinking about. Like, there's probably a bunch of other people that are finally having that realization unless maybe you had given your positions at Rocket Lab and Space Flight and everything else that you've worked on over the career that you had a little bit of an inside edge on like when that right moment was to switch the thinking. I mean, I'd like to pretend that I did, but I think it was more Chris Liewki's realization when we were founding this. He was very facetious about saying, let's write down core assumptions that we're making about the business. And one of the core assumptions was we can do a lot with the network of contractors.

We do not need to be a vertically integrated shop anymore. And certainly he had planetary resources had built vertically integrated. Oh, hold on a second. Everything's all off the grid here. I'm sorry. Jake Star like blew up our whole thing. All my windows started going everywhere. You're back, Jake.

Jump right in. Grant's telling me about the moment at which he realized that he could build a business around focusing just the parts that were unique to the business versus having to be building the fundamental tech to create space objects. Yeah, and I think the yada, yada, yada take home is, businesses we don't there there's depth in the supply chain now at the system level even there there we haven't quite entered the age of the commodity satellite bus but we're getting there launch is never been easier to procure so there's never been a more opportune time i don't think for the the space hardware guys to focus on the hardware they need build to enable their business

rather than the hardware that's in the way. Yeah, I would know what it's like to build a vertically integrated satellite shop. It's very, very hard. I would not want. Hold on a second. Can I just shed a little light on conversations you and I have had?

Pertinent to this week. You were the first person, and many people have told me to ask this question to Peter Beck directly. You were the first person to tell me that I should ask Peter Beck if you would put a photon on someone else's launch vehicle. and this week, was it Varda space that went up there with a photon on a SpaceX Falcon 9?

So you've been on this beat for a solid half a decade now. I don't want Pete to kill me. I mean, I asked him the question. He knows that I asked the question. He has the resources to have me killed if I say the wrong thing. Well, yeah, I mean, that was what was exciting was, and again, you know, Pete's vision for what RocketLab did. in the space systems group was bloody fantastic. And I do think that it was an early conversation.

And I hope I'm remembering this properly. But he said, you know, there's going to come a day when space missions that we do may briefly, if not forever outgrow launch capacities because all meaningful mission. Like Von Braun observed this forever ago. I think I tweeted about this a month ago. Most missions outgrow their launch capabilities. So the idea of having a space systems group that was launch agnostic at Rocket Lab. I mean, you didn't necessarily want it to be.

A lot of the offering was be a one-stop shop, buy your launch, buy your bus, whatever, with Photon. But there was no reason to say we can't do this mission because it doesn't fit on an electron. And I think VARTA is a vindication of that vision. And, you know, when you sit back and think about Rocket Lab in the space systems group, it's fantastic. It's prolific in the sense that with an exquisite spacecraft bus, you can do missions like capstone, lunar photon, you can do Varda, you can do things like that with ownership of the enabling products for everybody else's space mission. You can make good money and take on very little risk.

by just plugging yourself into everybody's space mission. Like, I've made this joke, and I hope it's not offensive to anybody. But I'd be curious to know if Rocket Lab doesn't make more money on a SpaceX transporter than SpaceX does. But they certainly take less risk. And the components are extremely lucrative. And, you know, that is an extraordinary product market fit. Like, the dogs want the dog food. So from a risk posture standpoint, you can sit back.

You can watch who the winners are. You can pick them. you can gobble them up growing organically. And now you're just a juggernaut of space systems where you can supply anything from a mission down to a widget. So like Rackalop's been big ass as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, yeah. All right.

You're back, Jake. I just wanted to add to that. Are you still doing this podcast? I forgot. Yeah, I am. Yeah, yeah. And maybe you already addressed this when I was in a power outage. But is that just, is there?

answer that kind of like, not simple, but that kind of boring that like it's just supply chain. We had to get the supply chain right before we could have a platform like this because, because you're right. And then like the stuff that you're making is like it's not, it's not like it's just a satellite that spins. Like we, we know how to make satellites. We know how to spin stuff. So there's nothing like incredibly, you know, crazy. Vengo bingo. We got the whole architecture right there. So like is that is that all it was? Is like the company, a company like what you have? wouldn't have been able to exist until we figured out this kind of deeper, more robust

supply chain where we have access different things like that? Is that the answer, as simple as it gets? No, I think it just would have been more challenging. And I will not let you diminish the difficulty of the control. Okay, yes, I do. I expected you to push back on that and I welcome it. If you want to get a sense of how difficult this looks, maybe can we queue up the video? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Here, we'll go full screen on it. All right. So this looks like your everyday spacecraft that might have popped off a transporter. It's designed to look that way. But once it's been delivered into orbit, a gravity lab spacecraft, and this is the first generation of spacecraft that we envision, would deploy a long, in this case, 20 meter long, relatively rigid boom. So it's almost like a tape measure, but reinforced and spacified. But I can describe that a lot in detail. You would start deploying and spinning this up to, to about 4 RPM at 20 meters long to simulate a lunar equivalent to gravity, equivalent to gravity, excuse me.

And this works the same way that if you swing a bucket of water over your head, you don't lose a drop. It's just centripetal acceleration. But because we can control the length of this, we can reel it in or reel it out because we can control the spin rate that this platform has, we can simulate any gravity level between zero gravity and one earth gravity. and we can do it at will during a mission that could be months, even years. The spacecraft is built to be packaged in a standard way to launch using standard interfaces

so that we can take maximum advantage of rideshare opportunities, but it doesn't preclude any sort of dedicated launch, which we might want for certain missions. In fact, there are certain missions where dedicated launch makes a lot of sense. But we'll be starting with ride share, and you can envision a spacecraft like this, tumbling end over end for months again or even years, with a cabin environment that is about the size of the inside of a beer fridge, or maybe a little bit bigger, 150 liters or so. So World Smallest Space Station.

I was mentioning a second ago, small enough that it's affordable, but big enough that it's just not something that the user community has ever experienced before. And same platform, and we did a lot of to work over the last year, actually prototyping that platform specifically. We showed it off at ASGSR, which is a gravity research conference last year, showed off the interior. We're showing off the

environmental control and life support technologies that we've made that are, you know, again, it's actually pretty, pretty compact overall in terms of the support avionics. So we've maximized volume for the users. But yeah, we've been able to focus on that part because everybody else or there are other people available now to build the other parts. The deployables, guidance, navigation, control, and things like that, you know, those are special to us. So that's stuff that Gravity Lab will hang on to pretty closely. But from the satellite bus side, you know,

it's a simple phone call to say, I've got to build this, I need it up in 18 to 24 months. Do you accept the charges from this collect call from Grant? And the answer is for suitable amounts of money. Yeah, sure, no problem. And away we go. But yeah, and that video is, depending on the audience, we want to make it seem extremely simple or extremely difficult.

I'm not like half kidding about that. But there's, yeah, if I was doing this 10 years ago, that I would have to go to the satellite shop first. I would have had to learn how to do, you know, copper beryllium tape spring boom. which is actually a thing that I did back in Canada, which was really fun. But that was also like almost two decades ago. So it's fading quickly from memory.

But you would have had to do all of these things sequentially. And now that I've got the toolbox and I've spent millions of dollars, now I can start to think about mission number one. Whereas now it's something that can be tried at, you know, even a pre-series A company. We are a pre-series A company. So we're at like a seed level company. So that's really exciting. And kudos to all the people with whom we're working for helping enable these kind of missions.

Because you've never seen anything like that. And the cameras on board are going to be wicked. Like something tumbled. The other thing, too, is we're not the only ones who are working on partial gravity spacecraft. We're just doing it in a very specific way that's really embracing microsatellites instead of trying to to scale towards human-tended facilities or human-occupied facilities, which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, that's certainly something I want to see.

But when we spent almost a half a year doing customer and market discovery for this business and something like 80% of the problems that we want to solve, and those are everything from fire suppression, physical sciences, plant growth experiments, some of the manufacturers, screen I was alluding to that's commercially extremely lucrative model organism research. So multi-generational rodent research, let the mice have the babies before we try to. You know, pretty much that entire spec. You're talking about cameras, man. Oh, boy.

You know what you don't want next to you when you're eating lunch is any of that stuff. I mean, you don't eat your hand in a biohazard level three facility for the same reason. for the same reason that tourists are not going to want the rodent research stuff happening next to their cabin and sharing the same air supply. That is a hilarious, hilarious thing to envision that really good dining room that Axiom's space has showed off and then just some rats getting it on right next door and being like, listen, man, we got to make a rent, you know, we got to pay the bills. Is this a PT show?

No, it's named Off Nominal, so. Well, yeah. So, yeah, you don't want, you don't want to collocate the difficult, the messy work with astronauts, would be my polite Canadian way of describing it. And it's, but at the same time, you can always benefit from astronaut hands. And so, so in this sense, we have a roadmap that kind of goes into the direction. I always say. I always could benefit from astronaut hands for sure, just generally.

I totally could but we see I guess the future of gravity labs if you want to turn off your internet again Jake you're more than welcome so are we at that point of the podcast my sensitive ears

no but but the we have designs on what we almost call like an astronaut mudroom where with different gravity labs that can be of the sort that you just saw these can look like Lego blocks that can be

assembled around a hub that might look something almost like a D-spun, Bishop Aerolock or what have you, where it can be intended, but it doesn't need to be human-occupied. And so if you're doing hazardous, dangerous, dangerous biologically or dangerous from a physical sciences standpoint work, this can be a thing that's basically an outrigger on a station for a very long time.

And then one day you reel it all in together and you bring it home. Or it functions as a free flyer. And it's essentially agnostic as to what implementation you're going after. The whole idea is to be completely complementary to the commercial Leo destination teams. And also to the other teams that I think are entering the fray. They're like vast and graphics, which we're cheering on. But yeah, our emphasis is on being the small guys that can knock out both the platform

control ability and dynamics challenges. but then also doing a lot of that kind of gross research that... Well, it's an interesting aspect. Like, the fact that... Like, we mentioned Zuban a couple of times, and I feel like he's the leader of, like, the, I don't know, big microgravity conspiracy theory, right? That, like, NASA decided it was a zero-g station,

so all artificial gravity was, like, cast off into the wilderness. And, I don't know, maybe, like, hell, there could have been people freaked out the time that Neil Armstrong did his own artificial gravity experiment and like that went really bad and then that was like, all right, let's not think about spinning astronauts again for a couple years. Whatever the mix was, you know, the, what is the maximum size of an artificial gravity experiment that has been run to date? This is probably something that came up in your research, but it's not very large, right?

Well, large in terms of- There was tethers on the space shuttle, right? but like what was the volume space of an experiment is probably fairly constrained at this point. Very constrained. I should know this off the top of my head and I don't have the numbers off the top of my head. So, but I'm sure somebody will, I'm in. One of the big micro-liadiests would chime in for sure. Well, there was a, there was a, I think it was a European mission that was launched on SSOA by spaceflight. Was that 2018, 2019?

that tried but failed to do an explicit artificial gravity demonstration. There have been centrifuges on the station, as you noted, and they're very small, short, armature, high gravity gradient, small experiment volume. So really nothing like this, which was the point, is when we talk to users, pretty much every user we've talked to, which is great. I'm glad that I didn't do the thing that I had the desire to do, which is just put together a pitch deck and go try to raise money. When I teamed with Chris Liewiki on this and shout out to him,

he was really both the force of nature but also the force of discipline. We said, we're going to figure out if there's a market here first. And we spent months talking to everybody. And the response was fantastic. Everybody said, yeah, not only is this a worthy problem, but if this platform existed, we'd be using it right away. And so that's been wonderful. If it had gone the other way, I'd just be a solution looking for a problem, which I have a tendency to do as an engineer.

It'd be able to be raising money like everyone else. And so, yeah, it definitely fits a, it feels like timing is great. It's an unmet need. But the thing that I mentioned before that fell out of this that I love is that the same platform that you use to figure out what the gravity prescription is can help you, make things that we haven't really contemplated making. My number one goal for the company, the next two years kind of tactical goal, is get that heritage so that we can start socializing people to the idea that a platform like this that can go from zero G to one G and stop anywhere in between, dial it up and dial it down

again is a thing that exists. How does that change how you'd want to make X, Y or Z? Sorry, my Canadian is showing X, Y, or Z. We've got to Z. This is where I'm outnumbered. I didn't even notice. I'm awkward by the Zeds. Two Zeds, one Z.

But yeah, so it's, it's, you know, when I worked at deep space industries, and that's actually how Chris Likki and I met, because we were compend mates, because he was at planetary resources, of course, the joke was that, you know, we're too early, and what's the difference between being too early and wrong? Nothing. And so, you know, asteroid mining, I think, was, we were, we were. certainly too early. But for this, it doesn't feel too early.

It feels perfectly timed. I mean, the darkest timeline is that everything about space falls apart. But then, okay, we're the only research platform that's helping move it forward for single-digit millions per mission. In the best timeline, everybody in their dog wants to go to the moon and Mars. And there's a whole bunch of research that needs to be done to reduce that risk, not just amongst the customers, but amongst the suppliers themselves. So early customers, for me, I anticipate actually being a couple of the clips teams that won't de-risk a couple of technologies. So it's exciting either way. Again, there's like no mundane future as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what kind of strikes me as interesting about it is that like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of many platforms that are specifically dedicated to creating an artificial environment. Like all the other kind of, you know, simulated gravity experiments that I can think of have been sort of shoehorned into other platforms. So, you know, like, we'll put it on the ISS because the ISS is there and there's astronauts so we can like make that work. Oh, throw it on a Virgin Galactic seat. There's, you know, we can do that. And it's quick, but we can make it work or, you know, okay, let's get the vomit comment and do this a bunch of times.

We can make that work. But it's all like been kind of compromises. And so this, this stands out to me as like that's what this is for. So, like, you can design the actual experiment you want or the actual test you want to do or whatever instead of trying to, like, fit the constraints of some other limited platform that was designed for a different thing, right? So you were hired for business development. Yeah. It's the second time that you just nailed it, man. No, I mean, very well said.

It is, you know, one of the, like, I don't want to say that it's a platform that can also or a, or a. a way of protein the problem that can include other people's solutions, but it does. There are people who are looking at small, and have flown small microsatellite or nanosatellite laboratories to do dedicated microgravity experiments. And certainly terrestrily, there are suborbital flights, there are dropped towers, there are parabolic flights that can facilitate transient research into gravity sciences. But nothing that can offer a very long duration. And if the mission is some microgravity manufacturing mission, I can do that. If you would like me to add some gravity at the end as a finishing step, we can do that.

If you want to play around with something that is lunar gravity, we can do that. If you'd change it to zero G in flight or ratchet it up to Mars G or Earth G, we can do that. So that flexibility, I think, is extremely desired. And a lot of people didn't know that they wanted it so bad until we started talking to them about it, which is always vindicating. It's always really cool when you talk to a customer or prospective customer and they're like, yeah, I want to pull this out of your hands. When can I do it? When can I fly? Those are the best conversation.

Actually, the best conversations are the ones with your operators when they say that the satellites actually working. But second to that is definitely the customers being enthusiastic. But yeah, you know, we're entering an era now. So again, the same things that are enabling us are enabling other people. I think you will see more a wider variety of really cool tech demos. Like, I'm really excited to watch how things turn out with Varda. That was like when I was kind of going up and down the transporter, like I'm on like the space slack where somebody was awesome enough to label all the spacecraft. And I recognize that one.

I worked on that one. I don't know what that is. Oh, that's finally launching. That's so cool. And you kind of go up and down. You're like, this is a really cool time to be alive in the small spacecraft industry where launch is relatively affordable. It hasn't been revolutionized the way a lot of people want to believe or the way that

anybody thinks the launch costs are falling prolifically is not try to buy it launch lately. But, you know, it's still good. It's better than it was five years ago. It's sure better than, like, geez, sorry, I'm like off on a tangent. But if I rewind 15 years ago, when it's a better, it's better than, geez, sorry, I'm like, off on a tangent. But if I rewind 15 years ago, when we were scrounging to get capacity on PSLV, on Soyuz Forgat, on NEPR when it was still flying, like, oh, do a launch campaign like that and try to stay married. It doesn't work. It's got real.

It's got real real. Oh, good. I've been in India for two months, and I think they just drove away with my spacecraft. I don't know what's happening. Or try to do a launch camp. campaign for Soyuz or, you know, or try to, or get enthusiastic about putting yourself on top of an ICBM that will gently deploy your payload almost as though it's been designed to ease a different type of payload into this.

At your house. Yeah, but now it's like you can go from, I need to book a launch to having it signs sealed and delivered, particularly through SpaceX, extremely efficiently, extremely quickly. quickly. It's really cool. So everybody in their dog seems really enthusiastic about these proliferated constellations for observation, communication, internet, or things, whatever. I'm actually, I'm still very much a technologist in the sense that I'm kind of excited about what the weirdos are going to come up with in terms of the onesie-to-z-twozy small submissions. You know, our goal is to not do a proliferated large number of builds to print. Part of our value is that we're, you know, going to help customers customize for every mission that they want to do to knock out these

manufacturing opportunities or these partial gravity challenges. But I think I mentioned a handful of minutes ago. We've got roadmaps that look at how we go big. If the Starship future, for example, that comes online the way that we all wanted to, I'm not counting on it, but I think we've got a really cool roadmap that syncs with it, if and when. I mean, don't bet against Elon, right? Unless it's about Twitter, then you could probably bet against Twitter.

Well, I'm a bit for a couple of reasons, but at the end of the day, heavy lift capacity is going to heave into existence during my career. And if my business isn't ready for it, then I've been negligent. I'm just coming up on some links I received during this show real quick. and the one that I received from Jake is just a link to the Curbel Space Program Wiki. So he would like to double down and downplaying the difficulty of the task that you face

and he thinks that you could just use a... What is this? A probo-dobodyne. This is what it looks like. This is what it looks like. Is this your announcement of KSP history too? KSB futures? Are you doing KSP future? KSB very present. KSB.

So if you think that you've got the bandwidth to do both the BD and like a CTO, a CTO role, then here we are. Jump on board and give some time. He's barely done this podcast, so you could definitely just take them away, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His internet connection is a little shoddy during the heat waves, though.

in the summer don't expect a lot out of them. Well, is it unprecedented that somebody offers a job to somebody on a podcast, which is subsequently accepted? Is that a beautiful theater where it's like, actually, you're the perfect fit for my job, podcast host. I would love for you to join my team. What do you say? But the ship is leaving now.

You have to answer me live. Live on the show. This is kind of a great idea for a show, that you have a hope. that's hosting the show until they accept a job at someone that they've interviewed, and then you get a new host, and then they interview a bunch of people until they accept a job, and then it's a new host. This is kind of a great idea.

The real job hoppers of podcasts. This is the most millennial idea you've ever had in your life. Yeah, maybe. No, there are first ones, but again, I had to check earlier with you, whether it was a PG podcast. At least PG, probably my other business ideas, but they're spectacular. Jake, does this make your Martian heart happy?

Yes. I mean, we've been talking about this. Like, we've so many questions. Like, we imagine all these glorious futures of inhabiting these other planets all the time. And we have no idea. We have no idea if we can. We'll run like the most long analysis of, well, what if the, methane processing facility only runs for two and a half years per mission cycle.

But what if the solar power goes out because of a dust storm halfway? We run the most intense nerd analysis of these architectures ever, but we've never done anything towards what if we lived there for a while? And then what happens? Let me also preface that with like if I'm betting, if I'm doing like a draft king's prop bet on amount of gravity humans require, I'm probably going to be on the lower end of this prop bet. Like, I feel like a little bit of gravity probably will do enough for us because it just, over a sufficient period of time, it probably will do enough.

I mean, hell, we've heard plenty of stories, some on this show about how long the first poop in microgravity takes you to complete successfully on the ISS. I think Richard Garriott went on at length in his book about this. So I bet pooping is way easier at point 1G than it is in 0G. So I'm betting on like, point two is probably fine. That's where I'm going to come down. Well, if you ever wanted a moment in your day where you could turn up the gravity level, then, yeah. Listen, I'm mid-potty training on a two-and-a-half-year-old at this point.

So I have many moments in my day when I wish I could turn up the gravity level. Oh, I mean, that's the time when you lock them in a room with your soon-to-be ex-wife and you go to an India launch campaign. And that's, this is your moment. And we're through that story. It sounded like my last night, to be honest. But yeah. But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting because I would also fall on the side of, you know, humans adapt extraordinarily well to different and challenging environments.

I think we just need to know what the adaptations need to be. And, you know, if we find that, that, that life is. extremely, like I'm kind of like a recovery marsaholic, more of an O'Neillian now, because I just think about all the things we would need to re-engineer for a Mars environment that we could simply take from the surface of the Earth and bring into an O'Neillian environment that is substantially similar to the one we experienced right now. The fewer things we need to rethink, the more likely our success is to be, is kind of the underpinning thinking behind that.

But I could be wrong. And I want to see, you remember that, that there was this amazing short film, Wanderers. You guys seen that? Oh, yeah. It's classic. Just to picking the experience of all these different destinations in the solar system, that was what the inside of my head looked like growing up.

So I want us to live everywhere. I just want us to be ready. The nightmare scenario for me is that we send a group of colonists would be colonists to Mars. And they're thriving for a chunk of time and that's really great. And then somebody decides that it's time to have the first baby on Mars and it doesn't work out well. Or somebody gets cancer and you can't get them back. But in the current age of everything is being videotaped, we have to watch a prolapsed period of suffering happen to a space settler, that could set back or preclude a lot of the future that we want. So I think,

I'm a big fan of charging ahead, but I want to be ready. That's all. And I think that we can, as a company, the excitement about Gravity Lab is let's, let's unlock this human future in space. Do it responsibly. Do it in a low cost as fast as practical way. And throw the needle. But let's, let's get out there. But again, let's not learn the bad lessons, the really bad lessons, the life and death lessons, the hard way. I didn't say anything about radiation, but I do want to touch on it really quickly. That's the other thing.

Four minutes left. Jesus Christ. All right. Well, that's not the other thing about doing this in microsatellite platforms. I also didn't talk about down mass and being able to return things because that's also really important. But one of the cool things about having something that I could stick on, you know, secondary capacity with Eclipse team is I can go out into some.

to this lunar space and do a lot of these experiments in a representative radiation environment, as well as in a simulated gravity environment. So I can cross couple those environments if I want to with this kind of platform in a way that other, I guess, station companies can't because they're going to be anchored in low Earth orbit. That's a huge value proposition, too, because I'm a radiation guy by training like an electronics nerd and had to do a lot of radiation stuff over the years. And it's a comparably difficult problem. And the answer is not, we shall boldly face the radiation.

You know, it requires more thought. And again, like I'm a big fan of taking risks, but risk management, I'm told, is about doing it responsibly. Yeah, don't take risks. You don't have to. That's the other part of that equation, right? Don't learn the hard way as a proxy for saying don't learn the expensive way. What risks can we knock out with what are in the context of the budgets of big space programs or private companies,

relatively small, you know, de minimis resources. Anyway, so yada, yada, yada, that's what Gravity Lab is here to do. All right. Yada, yada, gravity lab. Man. Nailed it. French Canadian goodbye. radiation and down mass

yada yada inquire again well you mentioned I guess there's another down mass solution other than what you mentioned about human not human tended but human visited momentarily visited experiment experiments

so that I mean that's a way to do it the way that I think is much more likely given that we look at discrete missions is that you would be... Actually, my original vision for this was that you would have a discrete capsule that would come down to return a sample. Now I've moved much more into the thinking

of the fully reusable spacecraft model. I will tease that since we're close to the top of... Two minutes left. My God. This is unreal. It changes your unit economics a lot if you can reuse your spacecraft and people from your outpost of the world over to your stoke space of the world that are looking at the in-space.

Is there a Stoke Space come and get you kind of situation that we could do? Maybe I'll be the next podcast. All right, okay. You'll have to get me back to get the answers to all questions. All right. Well, you have the calendar link. So whenever you want to come back on and jake downplay your other ideas about fully reasonable spacecraft, that would be great.

Next time, if I, if I have not, now that I've already plugged the company, next time I jump on, I can just tell you everything that I hate about the space industry and everything. This show is also good for that. Honestly, the reason we haven't had you on until June of 2023 is because we did that with you in November of 2019 on October, November. I forget when it was, at IAC. We had like a private off nominal on that rooftop where Robert Lightfoot rode an elevator with us. and we were too embarrassed to say anything because we just ripped him on the show for like four weeks we were calling him sleepy ass lightfoot

and we then got in an elevator with him and we were like oh oh oh that was cool right that was great it was great but yeah I forgot I forgot about the elevator part of it so good reminder good uh well I mean and I know that we're coming on time so I really appreciate you guys letting me jump on and talk at you for an hour

It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, it's been great. I'm glad you're finally doing this. That's what I'm excited about. Yes, me too. I've been the luckiest guy I know from a career standpoint, but it's, um, this is, this is like the passion project. So, uh, wish me luck.

Whenever you need some willing test subjects, we're here. That's awesome. Yeah, I think he could fit in that box. I don't think I could, but I'm thinking, I think he could fit 150 meters. Yeah. I think I could fit that. No problem. Of each of you can fit in the box.

It might not be the immersive experience that you want. Let's put a vision pro on me and we'll be good to go. No problem. Jake, shut her down. Listen, man, I don't know if we figured out what we're doing next week yet, to be real with you? No. No, I don't think we have. But if you want to be the first person who knows what we're up to next week, where should you go to find that information out, Jake?

you should head over to Offnom.com slash Discord and join up. We have a great community. We are doing all kinds of weird stuff in there. Every day is a new surprise for what bizarre space conversation we're going to

have in the Discord and it's always delightful for me. Most of the time we just bicker over pedantic arguments and stuff, but it's like always fun. It's always like a funny thing. Let me mention one other thing about Discord. I have not done the Discord, so I We'll do that in the early one. Okay.

You're going to love it, number one. Yeah. And you're going to be faced with a really tumultuous decision, which is there's two tiers. There's ride share and there's never fly ride share. They get you to the exact same place, but one is way more expensive. And you are someone who has sold both of these. So congrats on needing to make a decision for yourself for once. It should be tough.

I do want to mention, you could go in there and pay us money if you just want to support the show and never look at Discord again. And we would love that. Because if you like what this show is doing, that's where to support us. So I feel like we fail to mention that sometimes. You don't have to give a crap about what we're saying in the Discord.

If you just want to be a Never Fly Ride Chair member, you could do that. So I just want to mention that too, Jake. Yeah, yeah. You know? Well, I am officially signed up and online with your Discord. I do want to shout out someone who's been in the Discord forever, Jake, which is Adrian Bile.

and I've been personally informed by him that that is how you pronounce his last name unlike the NASA Space Flight YouTube channel pronounces it he came on Miko this week Jake and we talked about European launch German launch it's pretty sweet it's pretty good he's got an interesting perspective he's talked to these people he actually cares about it yeah yeah yeah it's good stuff I'm excited I haven't listened to it yet

but I'm excited well your internet's barely working down there in the I know I know it's just straightforward up chaos here. It's just like it's like, so. And it's 40 degrees Celsius, you said? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I had to do the conversion back to human units. It's hot. That's like 110% hot. That's too hot. Whatever your Fahrenheit thing breaks down. Your Fahrenheit will break down. No, it doesn't. It's too hot. If it's more than 100, and you don't, it doesn't matter, right? At that point, whatever your plans were, you should have changed them anyway. If it's 140, that's the same to me if it's

102. I don't know. Now living here, there's been 100 and 110. I can feel it. I can feel it. It's a different thing. I'm fine at 100. 110 of my question. I want to remind me that it's 70 degrees exactly and beautifully sunny here on a peepid sound in the scale. Don't you miss it, Jake. Could have been you.

It's good. Oh, audio listeners. check the video. That was as perfectly timed and set up as possible. We did not pre-plan that. Not even one bit. All right, y'all. Great.

Thanks for hanging out. You're the best. Everybody else. We will talk to you soon. Thanks, everyone. See ya. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1,000, end of death.