Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Aerospace Corporation President and CEO Steve Isakowitz

Episode Date: April 12, 2017

The Aerospace Corporation has been innovating since 1960. Now it’s headed by a former leader of “New Space” company Virgin Galactic. President and CEO Steve Isakowitz talks about the evolving culture of the space industry.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New space, old space, aerospace, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Steve Izikowicz has moved from Virgin Galactic to the nearly 60-year-old Aerospace Corporation. We'll talk with him about the changing culture of the space industry and some of what the scientists and engineers are up to at his new place of business. Later, we've got a special treat for the real space gearheads among you, our beloved podcast listeners.

Aerospace has just received a second round of funding for development of what amounts to a spacecraft printed on a sheet of paper-like plastic. We'll have an extended conversation with the scientists leading that effort. Phew! The Earth will survive another close encounter with an asteroid on April 19th. Bill Nye will share his concern about near-Earth objects. And we begin with a story reported by Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis. Jason, it's in this April 7th blog post, really quite fascinating and surprising, that we learn a little bit about NASA's latest revelations about

plans to get humans to Mars. This kind of snuck in under the radar, didn't it? But not for you. to get humans to Mars. This kind of snuck in onto the radar, didn't it? But not for you. Yeah. NASA announced this in a NASA Advisory Council meeting, which is kind of this group of third-party experts that NASA reports to on how things are going every now and then. And the council gives them plans and feedback, and NASA goes back, sees them again in three months. These meetings aren't really publicized. They are open to the public. So some space reporters listen in. But there was not a big publicity splash on NASA's part, certainly not on the level of, say, SpaceX's announcement of colonizing Mars or something like that. So it was not reported very widely, but few outlets did pick it up. And we definitely thought it was big news at the Planetary Society.

So I wanted to make sure we wrote about it. And I'm glad you did. We can't in any way cover everything you do in this blog post, but at least mention the two spacecraft that have been proposed. Yeah, the first one is called the Deep Space Gateway. And that's kind of a small space station. It would be in lunar orbit, assembled over the course of three SLS flights. And it's important to note a lot of people will call this a miniature ISS. It really isn't like that at all.

It's not meant to be permanently staffed. It can support a crew of four for about 42 days. So crews would come up, do some work, do some assembly, and then leave. And it would be automated to the point where NASA could do a lot of the stuff that they need to do, logistically speaking, moving it around in different orbits while there was nobody aboard. The other one, which is even more exciting. Yeah, so that's phase two, NASA calls it the deep space transport. The deep space gateway would kind of become this staging point in lunar orbit for anyone that wanted to come and use it. And that would be commercial partners, international partners.

Anyone that wanted to come and use it, and that would be commercial partners, international partners. But for NASA's purposes, they would bring up this gigantic all-in-one launch transport ship. It could be kind of on the volume size approaching Skylab, which was the huge space station we had in the 70s. This would be the giant transport ship that takes people to Mars. It would be reusable up to three times, three full round trips, thousand days at a time to take a crew of four out to Mars and back. After going to Mars and then coming back, it would dock back at the Deep Space Gateway. That's this little space station and get refurbished. NASA is really trying to appeal to everybody here. You know, there's this whole moon versus Mars, commercial space versus traditional aerospace companies, and they think they've got these two core components that might satisfy everybody.

And it's just kind of flying under the radar. NASA's maybe feeling it out, see how it's received, and we'll see where it goes from there. And how. And I know you'll continue to follow this one as well. It's kind of a must-read for anybody who's interested in seeing humans on or at least near Mars. And if you read the April 7 blog post, you'll find out what Elon Musk thinks of all of this and also about United Launch Alliance's plans. Jason, thanks again. Yeah, thanks, Pat. That's the digital editor for the Planetary Society, Jason Davis. Up next is his and my boss, Bill Nye, the CEO. Bill, every time we are in any danger of forgetting about the danger from near-Earth asteroids, near-Earth objects,

we get a reminder like the one we're going to talk about. Yeah, our good friend asteroid 2014 2014 JO25 came pretty close. It's farther than the moon, but still big enough to detect 650 meters. That's a half mile. That's huge. It's huge. It's not quite a half mile, but it's big. And if it hit, going at any reasonable velocity, 11 kilometers a second, let's say, that would be that. That would be dial tone.

That would be control-alt-delete, that would be that. That would be dial tone. That would be control, alt, delete. That would be bad. And so it's the kind of thing since, I mean, I just think about ancient peoples, many millennia, 50,000, 100,000 years. This wasn't an issue. They didn't know what happened. They didn't know that it didn't happen and so on. We really are living in an extraordinary time where we could do something about one of these objects. And I just tell everybody all the time, we really need to take this seriously. We need to detect them and really think about having a way to deflect one. And the sooner you find it, the better. Just give it the tiniest nudge way, way 20, 15 years before it crosses the Earth's orbit would be a wonderful thing. 20, 15 years before it crosses the Earth's orbit would be a wonderful thing.

Now, I truly don't know, but your TV show comes out on Netflix in just over a week as we speak. Do you mention near-Earth objects? Maybe. Yeah, yeah. We have a whole thing about near-Earth objects. And we have a thing about Mars having been hit by an object and ejecting Martian material into space, some of which landed here on Earth, and pointing out that could happen again

any old time. Yeah. That TV show, not the asteroid, that's going to pass us by, but the TV show premieres on April 21st, Friday, April 21st on Netflix. And I'm looking forward to having a longer conversation with you

about that program right here on this program, Bill. Good, the first 13. We want you to binge watch them. Watch one after another. Turn it up loud. Bill Nye saves the world. He saves it there and he saves it here with us on Planetary Radio. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society.

Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Matt. The Aerospace Corporation is unique in several ways. It has revenues of over $900 million, yet it's a non-profit. It has revenues of over $900 million, yet it's a non-profit. It has been doing cutting-edge research and development for the U.S. military, NASA, other aerospace companies, and many additional customers since 1960. I was 11 years old when I got my first tour of the organization's sprawling Southern California campus. A friend of my parents was one of the hundreds of scientists employed by Aerospace.

I guess he recognized me for the budding space geek I was. I've been going back ever since, most recently on March 21st of this year, when the company opened its doors for an unprecedented event. Aerospace has partnered with Starburst Accelerator to host a home for innovative startups. Ten of those fledgling companies made their pitches to 200 industry leaders and stakeholders. At the same time, aerospace itself showcased some of its most innovative work. We'll feature an utterly fascinating high-tech conversation with the leader of one of those aerospace projects at the end of today's show, after we share a few what's up minutes with Bruce

Betts. Steve Izikowicz is the new president and CEO at aerospace. His hiring last October in itself may represent a bridge between what is known as new space and the old line companies that have led the aerospace industry for nearly a century. Steve served as president of decidedly new space, Virgin Galactic. Earlier, he was chief technology officer for VG, where Spaceship Two is being flight tested. And he's a bit of an aerospace budget and policy wonk who earned a name for himself in Washington, D.C. Steve and I ducked out of the day's festivities for a brief conversation about the industry he loves. Thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Oh, it's my pleasure. How long have you been here now on this campus? I've just been here a little over six months. It's quite a change in culture. You know,

we've reported on Virgin Galactic many times. I was just out there looking at Spaceship Two. Galactic many times. I was just out there looking at Spaceship Two. Aerospace, much more traditional type of operation, isn't it? Yeah, it is. I think what we're finding here is what's happening in the entire space industry, which is old meets new. New ideals, new companies are bringing forth. And the old ideals still have their important role in terms of where we're going in America's space program. And I think what we're going in America's space program. And I think what we're seeing is sort of the new revolution of technology and innovation that brings this all together. In this neighborhood, which borders LA International Airport, LAX, you've got lots of neighbors who represent that tradition, but you also have neighbors like the one not far from here called SpaceX. Yes, there's a lot of innovation actually around the corner from here,

whether it's SpaceX, whether it's Virgin, whether Rocket Lab's planning to eventually come here. So there's a lot of companies. We've got other ones even outside of space are creating this ecosystem like Hyperloop and Silicon Beach, which is around the corner. So I think what you're finding is happening in Los Angeles is what you're finding, what happened up north in the north part of California, where you got smart people, money, new ideals, really new technologies that are game-changing. And just because you mentioned it, Rocket Labs is that company based in New Zealand, right?

Exactly. Richard Branson seems like he'd be a really fun guy to work for. What would pull you over here to aerospace? Well, he actually is really fun guy to work for. What would pull you over here to aerospace? Well, he actually is a great guy to work for. And there's a lot of fun things we were doing at Virgin. But what actually brought me over here is right now I see that all three sectors of space are going through transformational change. On the national security side, we're finding we're having to rethink how we architect space

now that we're being competed and contested for the things that we're having to rethink how we architect space now that we're being competed and contested for the things that we're trying to do in space. In civil side, NASA's trying to go to the moon and Mars, and no, they can't do it Apollo style. They've got to rethink in terms of how to get there affordably and this time to stay. And then in the commercial side, it's just been explosive in terms of the amount of growth. Small satellites have changed the way we're thinking about who can enter this field. It used to be you had to start with $100 million. Now today you could actually start with $1 or $2 million, maybe even less.

At a university, you could build your small CubeSat and put something in orbit and actually demonstrate your new technologies. So what brought me to aerospace is I see all these three sectors going through transformational change, and I can't think of a single organization that actually touches on all three and helps to shape them like aerospace does. This event that's taking place here today, which is at least two events rolled into one, does this represent some of that change? Yeah, absolutely.

Aerospace has had a long history of innovation, whether it was the earliest days of the Mercury and Gemini project for NASA to try to figure out how to get people safely into space using ICBMs, to actually the creation of GPS, which is we helped co-create that working with the Air Force. So we've had a history of innovation. What I'm trying to do now is to try to bring us up the next step, to try to have us produce the kinds of innovation that I think will be game-changing, that I've seen in our own labs, like virtual reality, like 3D manufacturing, like working with these small sats that we've been launching for years. But it also involves trying to bring new ideas in from the outside. I think one of the areas of impedance I see right now is you've got a lot of really exciting things

happening in the commercial area and a lot of tremendous need from the government. And that bridge to connect it to is oftentimes a bridge too far. And this is where I see aerospace has a unique role. Being a nonprofit organization and a trusted advisor to the government, we can provide the kind of due diligence to the government to help make those linkages. And the role that aerospace has played for decades has been huge. But it's not one that a lot of people, probably not a lot of people listening to this show are aware of. Everybody knows Boeing. A lot of them know SpaceX now,

but aerospace has brought probably thousands of innovations that have moved this forward. Yeah, that is interesting about the Aerospace Corporation. And part of it is because if you look at the birth of aerospace and what we did for decades, we worked on a lot of classified programs. And so by its very nature, we sort of stayed behind the scenes. In fact, I was recently went up to on the hill and was meeting with a congressional staffer. And he said, you know, I've never heard of Aerospace Corporation. What do you do? So I went and explained the things we worked on. And he said at the end, you know, I've heard everything that you just talked about. And I had no idea that you guys were the ones behind it.

You still do a lot of work with the Air Force. In fact, that you're across the street neighbor, that's still pretty important, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. In fact, we are literally across the street, and we really have a bridge, not a figurative, but a literal bridge that connects my office to the general and the commander's office to get over there quickly so we can work very closely with them. But we're also a national company. I think we're most known for working with the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center here. But we also work with the National Reconnaissance Office. We work with the Air Force Space Command. We work with NASA. We work with the FAA.

We actually do some commercial activity. So we, as an organization, are actually a truly national corporation. So organizationally, a pretty exciting place. But how about some of the work that's underway, some of the things that you can talk about anyway that are most exciting to you? I'll give you one up front because I just spent some time with one of your people who's developing a spacecraft on not a piece of paper, that's just the conceptual one, but a flexible, flat spacecraft. Yeah, so you're actually referring to what we call the brain craft.

And the idea behind this is we have since literally the beginning of America's space program, we have been tracking the proliferation of satellites and unfortunately some of the orbital debris that results from these satellites in orbit. And they proliferate in orbit to the point now it actually has become a significant issue. It's actually inexpensive to break apart your satellite in orbit. It's very expensive to clean up the mess. And although it's not a trivial issue anymore, it is one that if we're not careful,

we could find that we could harm for generations to come the ability to have access to space. So what we wanted to do here at Aerospace is not just analyze the problem, but bring some solutions. So we've seen a proliferation of orbital debris, and we want to find the solution. This is one of these cases where we have smart people here. In fact, we have 3,600 people in this company. Two-thirds are advanced degrees, and one-third of them actually have PhDs. So some of our folks said, why don't we build the world's

smallest spacecraft? So literally, we came up with a design for a spacecraft that's as thick as a piece of paper. And the idea behind it is using some advanced technologies, you can actually have this sort of paper spacecraft wrap itself around orbital debris and actually bring things down from orbit. Absolutely fascinating. And we're going to let the audience hear a little bit more about this from the guy who's leading that effort in a few minutes. What else is most exciting to you that's underway here?

Well, a lot of things that we think about is how we can do things more efficiently and how we can help new companies make these connections with the government. So, for example, right now we're working with a lot of the startup companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin who are building new engines, new rockets, and they want to service the government for it. But as anything new, sometimes the startups can have its successes and failures along the way. Yet the government oftentimes can be very risk-averse, and the satellites they launch are not inexpensive satellites. They can be very expensive satellites. So one of the things we're trying to do is to create that bridge to sort of help these companies

along so when they get to the point that they could start flying government satellites, they develop the kind of reliability that the government demands. But it's also a win-win because the commercial sector also wants reliable launch systems. One of the toughest challenges today is when you have to wait for your launch vehicle because there was a failure or problem that happened earlier. So to the extent that we can work with these companies and help them develop more reliable vehicles, I think it's a win-win for commercial and government. I'm going to kind of go back to debris, but maybe debris of another kind.

And I'll note that this is the only corporate campus I know of where there might otherwise be sculptures, works of art. There are bits of debris that have been gathered from, I assume, around the world from spacecraft. have been gathered from, I assume, around the world from spacecraft. But another topic that we talk about a lot on this show, which this company has been a leader in, is dealing with near-Earth asteroids. I know that you've got folks here who are very involved every couple of years with the Planetary Defense Conference, which I've been to a couple of times. Where does that fit in? Well, you know, one of the things that we enjoy when you're in a company that has really smart

people, they really enjoy taking on really big and tough problems. And this is actually an interesting one. You know, one of the things that they say separates an intelligent beings from less than so is the fact that the dinosaurs lack their own space program. That's right. Our boss says it all the time. So we take that serious. So we like the challenge to try to say, what do you do with the worst case of asteroid that comes in and really represents an existential threat to this planet?

What can you do to solve that problem? And there's no really easy solution for it, but when you get sort of smart people coming together, we've actually spent considerable time and effort to try to see are there approaches and are there ways to bring people together? Because this would be a worldwide issue. How do you bring together some of the smartest people in the world to try to address a problem like planetary protection? Yeah, and there is some real leadership being provided from this campus in that area. What do you think is the future

for space development, space industrialization, and where aerospace kind of fits into that? You've sort of addressed this, but I want to see if you have anything more specific. Well, to answer your question directly, I'm an optimist, and I believe that the role of space is being made clear every day, whether it's GPS that gives us the strongest military in the world, whether it's the ability to do research to better understand our planets, the stars around us, the planets that we share in the solar system. These are things that I think bring true applications, great fundamental signs, and inspire a next generation of engineers and scientists.

But I would also say we live in an interesting time where it's no longer just about the government having to finance America's space program. More and more we're seeing the commercial sector, through its own applications, moving space forward. So although I think the government can certainly be a catalyst for some of the applications we're looking at, I think some of the most exciting innovations today are actually happening at the commercial sector without the assistance of the government. So a bright future? Absolutely. I got a couple of things to thank you for. One is this conversation. The other has to do with a certain spacecraft that we care a lot about at the Planetary Society, and that's LightSail. There are a couple of cameras on LightSail, which came from here. Oh, wow.

That's fantastic. I actually didn't know that. Well, we're LightSail 2 is waiting for a ride on the second Falcon Heavy, and it will be the first one that actually we hope will be high enough and will actually demonstrate maneuvering on orbit and raising its orbit just with the power of sunlight. It'll be cameras from here at aerospace that return the images that we're all looking forward to seeing. Well, that's great. That's what's so fun about working here is every day I'm learning something new, of things that we're contributing for, things that we're making a difference on,

people with amazing stories of achievements that they've been able to achieve while here. And LightSail is clearly one of them. Thank you, Steve. And best of luck with this new and pretty exciting step in your career. Thank you. I'm very excited, and thanks for the time. Steve Izzikowicz, president and CEO of the Aerospace Corporation, talking with me in March at the company's campus in El Segundo, California.

Stay tuned, podcast fans, for a bonus conversation with Siegfried Janssen, the aerospace scientist who is developing the brain craft mentioned by Steve. We'll look skyward with Bruce Betts right after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there,

waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Encouraging people from all walks of life Space exploration truly brings out the best in us, encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal, to know the cosmos and our place within it.

This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society,

who joins us each week to tell us about the night sky, which it's one of those rare occasions when we are actually under the night sky. Well, indoors, but it's nighttime. We don't usually record these at night. It's so scary and exciting. Spooky and exciting. I should have recorded outside, darn it. Oh, that would have been fun. We both could have done it.

I'm outside. Maybe another time. If we were outside right now, we'd be able to see Jupiter easily in the evening sky coming up in the east in the early evening. Dominating the sky is the brightest star-like object up there. And then we've still got Mars, but it's gotten fairly dim, still kind of a bright-looking reddish star over in the west in the early evening. Saturn's up in the middle of the night, and Venus is now dominating low in the eastern sky before dawn. Next week, I will have a little information about the star party that I went to at the McDonald Observatory in Texas as we talk about other stuff there. What a great star party they had. We saw Jupiter.

Did they have different stars? They did. Many more than we can see from Los Angeles. Yeah, okay. On to this week in space history. It was 1972 that Apollo 16 launched to the moon with humans on board. Yeah, second to the last. Still something to be proud of. We move on to space. Oh, I really shouldn't have done that.

Well, thank you for trying. You stepped up the game. I really wanted something new. I didn't know it cave in the back of my throat. Moving right along. I thought this was interesting when I noticed it. Of the eight largest trans-Neptunian objects, so objects that hang out past Neptune, Pluto and Eris being the two biggest, of the eight largest trans-Neptunian objects that we know of, seven of the eight

have moons. Wow. Only Sedna doesn't, and Sedna's so far away that I'm guessing we're not totally sure. So I bet it won't be surprising if we find a moon or two going around planet nine whenever they find out where it is. It's true. It's a very trans-Neptunian object if it's out there. Yeah. Let's go on. In the trivia contest, I asked you, what is the optically brightest quasar as seen from Earth? Wow, this really took off. A lot of people were excited by the results of this question, because it's such an amazing object. Nathan Phillip out of Knoxville, Tennessee, first time winner if he's got this right, he said we should be talking about quasar or quasar

3C273. That is the optically brightest quasar in the night sky, even though it's 749 megaparsecs away. Yes, that is correct, 3C273. Can you tell us more about this amazing object? Sure. It was the first quasar, quasi-stellar object, ever to be identified. Its magnitude still puts it way too dim to see with the unaided eye. Its apparent magnitude is about 12.9. It's also one of the closest quasars, but as you've noted, that still puts it

really far away, something like 2.4 giga light years. Now here's another way to judge the distance to this quasar, and it comes from our winner, Nathan. Nathan, by the way, congratulations. You're getting a Planetary Radio t-shirt, the second to the last rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account. He said, to put that in a reasonable perspective,

the distance to this object, that's about 62 million times longer than Han and Chewy's record for the Kessel Run. perspective, the distance to this object, that's about 62 million times longer than Han and Chewie's record for the Kessel Run. Okay. It's complicated, though, since they seem to be using it as a measurement of time. But we won't get into that. The real Star Wars fans, they explain that away.

They take care of that. But just the same. Mark Little said 10 trillion degrees, that's the temperature of this quasar, just barely hotter than the internet when a Planetary Radio episode is released every Wednesday. Oh! Yeah, I wonder how he got mentioned. Sam Glick, he mentioned that same apparent magnitude that you talked about. He was one of a ton of people who talked about how if this thing was, you know, 30 or 33 light years away, it would still be as bright or brighter than our sun. Another way to put it, Eric O'Day in Medford, Massachusetts,

he says with its absolute magnitude of minus 26.7, oh my God, you'd need 250 undecillion 60-watt light bulbs. All I can tell you, it's 250 with a whole bunch of zeros. You know, I think I've got those in my cabinet here. In the garage? You're the guy who's hoarding those. The old-fashioned runs, right? The incandescents.

Oh, yeah. Finally, from Martin Hajoski, great. This is like an earworm. Now I'm going to spend my time driving looking for that combo in license plates 3C273. If I find it, I'll send you all a photo. Oh, please do. That's it. We're ready to move on. Please do.

That's it. We're ready to move on. How many moons in our solar system are larger than Pluto? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And I do believe you have until Wednesday the 19th this time. Wednesday, April 19th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. and you will win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net account, that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes that you can dial into and take pictures of maybe this quasar. I don't know.

The magnitude might be within reach of one of their scopes, one or more of their scopes. And how about this? A March for Science pin, which came to me from who knows where in the universe, but I have a couple of spares for the upcoming March for Science. And if you'd like a pin for the March, you'll get it after the March, but we'll send it your way. Nice prize package. Thank you.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about your favorite kind of electronic cabling. Thank you, and good night. I don't have a favorite. I hate all cables. I was so thrilled when we got rid of tape, magnetic tape. I'm hoping cables are next, okay? Can you arrange that?

I'll work on it. Thank you. He's Bruce Betts. He's going'll work on it. Thank you. He's Bruce Betts. He's going to work on it. Why? Because he's the director of technology and science for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Okay, we're ready now for my nearly half-hour conversation with Aerospace Corporation's Siegfried Janssen.

Siegfried leads the BrainCraft project mentioned by President and CEO Steve Izikowitz a few minutes ago. I sat down with the senior scientist in the midst of many other demonstrations underway for visitors to the Aerospace and Starburst Accelerator event last March. Sigfried held a sheet of paper printed with a complex pattern of shapes and connections. That piece of paper turned out to be an early step toward an amazing, flexible spacecraft that may someday be printed, yes, printed by the thousands. Just a few days ago, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Office, or NIAC, awarded Siegfried and Aerospace a Phase II grant for further development. We'll get to the brain craft, but it's just one type of innovative spacecraft that Siegfried has worked on.

Including CubeSats. Of course. Which, as you know, CubeSats are very near and dear to our hearts at the Planetary Society. Yes. I started out looking at silicon satellites about 20 years ago. And that morphed into CubeSats simply because CubeSats were much easier to make than silicon satellites. Well, I guess the indications are, from what we're going to talk about in a moment, silicon satellites or something similar must be getting closer to reality because you've got something to show me. But first, why CubeSats? Why is a company like Aerospace interested in the potential of these very small spacecraft? Well, they accelerate the evolution of technology development for spacecraft.

Traditionally, if you want to test some new device, say an Earth sensor or a sun sensor on a spacecraft, you'd have to integrate it onto another spacecraft somebody was building, which typically took seven years from permission to proceed to flying. CubeSats cut that down to a year or less. So that means we can design, build, fly, get data, and start improving the next design on a one-year time frame. That's a huge advantage. That's like microbes evolving much faster than humans. That's

where we're at with CubeSats. It's the ability to inexpensively and more importantly, rapidly evolve new space technologies. They have to fit on a CubeSat, but if you can fit them, you're ahead of the game. It's also a question of signature authority. Small satellites are great because you can fly for a million dollars or for a few million dollars you can fly a fairly complex CubeSat. But if it was, say, a microsatellite, the cost of doing that would go above 10 million and now you'd need more people to sign off on it. So it's much easier to do a small satellite effort. Are we learning to put more and more complex stuff in the space of a cube or a multi-unit cube? I mean, for example, as you probably know,

LightSail is a three-unit cube, 10 by 10 by 30 centimeter. Are we getting better at cramming stuff in there? Yes, we are. It takes 3D CAD to do it. It's one of the enablers of CubeSats. Just the ability to fit everything in. Sometimes you do need that last millimeter of space to fit something new in there. systems sensors and a laser comm in a 1.5 u cubesat which is about six inches long by four by four inches and it's got a laser range finder on board so we're getting better at cramming things in at some point though you run into trouble if it consumes a lot of power once you have deployable wings now you may may need radiators to dump the excess heat but general, we're getting better. But more importantly, we're learning the failure modes. We've flown about 30 spacecraft so far. Some of those are not satellites. They just come back and re-enter, burn up, but land in the ocean. Each time we fly something, we learn. And that's how we're doing improving the reliability. We've had satellites that last half a day on orbit, a decade or so ago,

and now we've got satellites that have been functioning fine for four and a half years on orbit. So we're learning a lot. The one issue that I see for the future, though, for CubeSats is going to higher altitudes. The first problem is there's a 25-year orbital lifetime that's mandated by the FCC. Right now, the Earth's atmosphere is kind of weak because solar activity isn't all that strong. Those lifetimes are increasing. If you want to go above about 650 kilometers, you need some way of actively bringing down your satellites some distance because atmospheric drag isn't going to do it typically. The other problem is radiation. We use commercial off-the-shelf devices, which has historically been a no-no for spacecraft. You want high reliability devices, typically chips that are in ceramic

packages rather than plastic packages, things that have a heritage. We're building up a database on heritage simply by flying lots of things. But as you go above 650 kilometers, if you look at the radiation effects, commercial off-the-shelf electronics typically are good for 1 to 10 kilorads on orbit. You go above 650 kilometers, you may only have a year of lifetime available. Is this because you get up into the range of the Van Allen belt? Yes. Radiation levels in low Earth orbit typically increases the fifth power of altitude. So if you double your altitude, you've got, what is that, 32 times the radiation. Up until now, CubeSats have occupied fairly low altitudes, typically 600 and below.

You go above that, well, you're going to have to use some radiation-hardened or at least radiation-tolerant parts. And you may know that LightSail 2 is going higher because we need to get well above the atmosphere to really demonstrate solar sailing, but then we're not looking to stay up forever. You mentioned in passing something that you are hoping to get onto a CubeSat. You told me just before we started recording, you just mentioned it in passing, laser communications. Oh, yes, it is integrated on a CubeSat. NASA funded us starting in 2012, so that's five years ago now, to put a laser transmitter on a CubeSat. So we've built the optical communications and sensors demonstration CubeSats.

We ended up building three of them for NASA. We flew one about a year or so ago. We had a problem uploading new routines into the attitude control system, and we discovered a failure mode that we hadn't seen before. We've upgraded processors on orbit over 200 times. This time we did something a little different and it bit us. Basically that processor stopped functioning and there's no way to to fix it. You need to physically connect to it.

So we learned and we've got two more waiting to go, which were the original satellites. This other one was a Pathfinder, and that's exactly what it did. It showed us the path. But it was successful. It's a satellite that is a laser comm. We couldn't turn it on because the laser comm is controlled by the attitude control system. You put a laser in space, we have to work with what's called the laser clearinghouse. We're not allowed to turn on a laser unless we know where it's going. So if the attitude control system doesn't work, you cannot turn on the laser no matter what you do. There is a central authority that tells you how you can or cannot use lasers in space?

Yes. Mostly we deal with them to make sure that we don't inadvertently light up some sensitive detector, either on the ground or in space. So there is a group that monitors this. I'm not sure if NASA has to follow that, but we have to follow it. We try to keep them happy. This is a very hot topic because, of course, as we go places like Pluto and even places much closer than that, getting lots of data from one place to another looks like it'd be much easier with a laser, right, than radio frequency. Yes and no. The laser comms that we're flying are not your typical laser data transmitters. The high-end transmitters that you see in space are typically

a foot or so in scale and weigh 30 kilograms or more. And they have micro-radian beam widths, the angular beam, the beam spread. That's very tight. It's very tight. Yeah, radian's about 57 degrees. So take 57 and divide it by a million, and that's how wide the beam is. Our beams are more milliradian, one milliradian type of divergence, fraction of a degree. We can get away with that because we're in low-earth orbit. Our distances are short. We're dealing with maybe a thousand kilometer maximum range. It all works out very well. We can download up to 200 megabits per second using the NASA satellites. We're also looking at higher data rates for other satellites that we're building here at aerospace. Looks like you can easily do or readily do a gigabit per second, which is higher than

what you're going to get with most radio frequency communications. Now, if you go out, if you want to use it on an interplanetary scale, you can't use this technique because you won't get enough photons on the ground to collect. So you have to go to the microradian class beam. That's doable, but it does require an attitude control system that can point to that level of accuracy. And just realize, you know, if you're at Mars sending a beam to the Earth, you don't just have to hit the Earth. You've got to hit a part of Southern California if that's where your laser receiver is. So that gets quite tricky.

There's a lot of math involved, and we're just, we're not there yet in the CubeSat world, although larger spacecraft can do it. What does this then make you think of folks like the people behind Breakthrough Starshot, which we've talked about on this show? Interstellar travel for tiny robotic spacecraft, talking about using lasers to communicate not just from within the solar system, but from light years away. Yeah, that's an extremely difficult topic. It's a challenge. But you know, other people have had other ways of doing it. The late Dr. Robert Forward had this thing called Star Wisp. Yeah. He wanted to do it at microwave frequencies. So his optics weren't on the ground, they were in space. And I believe his lenses were effectively a thousand kilometers in diameter or so. So there are other ways of doing it.

It's a challenge. I know the Starshot people want to keep all the lasers on the ground just due to cost. But I think eventually they're going to have to go into space. It's not clear to me that you can put that much power in such a small space through the atmosphere without creating a lot of obstacle instabilities. But maybe they have a solution. Well, they're working on it. Right.

Tell me about this thing that's behind you on the table here. This is a concept called brain craft, where brain is short for membrane. B-R-A-N-E. B-R-A-N-E. Yeah, not B-R-A-I-N. Right. Wrap your brain around the brain. Okay.

What it is, it's an idea for making ultralight spacecraft, kind of like Starshot, make it essentially a two-dimensional spacecraft. The difference between Starshot and this is that this is a fully functional spacecraft that doesn't use laser power for propulsion. It actually uses distributed ion engines, electrospray thrusters. And the idea is to print a spacecraft onto Kapton sheets that are 20, 25, 30 microns thick. I've got to say, first of all, we've got to describe what you're holding in your hand, which is maybe a half-meter square or 18-inch square of paper with what looks like, I first saw this, I thought, oh, you're going to fold this into a CubeSat. No, it's a flat spacecraft. Correct, yeah. This is half-scale, actually, for what I'm looking at. It's a piece of paper, basically a PowerPoint slide that's big,

but it's got, you know, thousands of solar cells printed on the top, not functional, just blue ink. You know, thousands of solar cells printed on the top, not functional, just blue ink. But you have these various blocks, ion engines, electronics, sensors. The idea is to put a spacecraft on a diet. Get rid of all the mass you can and then get rid of physical structure and replace it with thin plastic sheets. You're basically printing a spacecraft on plastic. And what makes this different is that the structure is composed of the plastic sheets, but there are two main sheets that are separated by about 20 micron gap. And that gap is filled with a propellant for the electrospray thrusters. It's an ionic liquid,

which is, think of salt that's liquid at room temperature. These are more exotic than salt, but basically a mixture of cations and anions. And these electrospray thrusters use those to generate thrust. The beauty of the ionic liquid is that most of them have almost no vapor pressure. So you can have an open bottle in space, and it's not going to evaporate. So for us, it means we can sandwich the propellant between two sheets of plastic and it's held in place by capillary action. Oh my gosh. Just like water. Right. Except it doesn't evaporate. Right. So we don't have to worry about a propellant tank. You know, the basic structure serves as the propellant tank. Now there are lots of other

complications because it turns out ion engines tend to operate at one to three kilovolts or so. Typical xenon ion engines, it's not an issue because the propellant isn't electrically conductive. That's like the ion engines like on the Dawn spacecraft, which got it to two different asteroids. Right. When you use electrospray thrusters, life gets a little easier because the thrusters are small. They're essentially two-dimensional, but your propellant is conductive. So now if you're firing the thruster, your propellant tank is at one to three kilovolts with respect to the rest of the spacecraft. So what does that mean for the

brain craft? It means we actually have to section it off into multiple tanks so that only one tank at a time is connected to the ion engine. And one of the reasons we need to do that is because it's an ultra-thin spacecraft. A 10-micron particle traveling at 20 kilometers or so per second will penetrate the spacecraft. So a bit of space dust. A bit of space dust will short it out. And actually, in one month in low-earth orbit, we can have 40 impacts that go through this sheet of paper here, which is really a spacecraft. So it has to be designed literally to be bulletproof to micrometeorize. And that requires

distributed electronics, some intelligence, and a propulsion system that can section off different parts of the propellant tank. So we'll put a picture of this up on the show page for this week at planetary.org slash radio. But it's a flat spacecraft. I think it's worth restating. We're looking at something printed here on paper, but you said eventually capped on. Even the engines are printed on the capped on. Correct. Now, in practice, we'll probably end up printing the solar cells and maybe the electronics, and the ion engines will probably be fabricated in a separate laboratory foundry and then bonded on. Because typically the processes are different for the ion engines than they are for the electronics.

For the electronics, we need carbon nanotube electronics because of the radiation levels that this thing will experience. There's almost no shielding. There's basically, you know, 5, 10 microns of shielding. And when you do the analysis, you discover, okay, for one month on orbit, I can hit a megawatt of radiation total dose. Silicon electronics can't handle that. Turns out carbon nanotube electronics can, but it's a new technology. We've made some transistors in the laboratories here at Aerospace, but for the phase two effort for this brain craft, we've proposed building logic gates using carbon nanotube electronics.

Turns out carbon nanotube electronics are being developed in the commercial world for flexible electronics. Part of that's because you can print carbon nanotubes on plastic structures, and you can stretch them, and they'll still work. We don't need the stretchiness, but we need the radiation tolerance. But you did talk earlier, before we started recording, about the flexibility of this spacecraft, and that it would actually take different shapes depending on what it's doing? Correct, yeah. And for that we do need a little flexibility.

Again, you've got something that's maybe twice the thickness of plastic wrap. It'll be a little more rigid because it's Kapton and it's multi-layered with propellant in between. But it needs some curvature just to maintain its structural strength because a sheet of paper, if you hold a sheet of paper by the edge simply, it just hangs down. But typically when you hand someone a piece of paper... And you've got it sort of bent or curved with your, just with your thumb there. Right. Typically, I do it. I have a thumb on top and two fingers underneath. The two fingers are generating local local curvature which curves the rest of the structure into a shape that can resist gravitational bending and this sheets

counts 16 inches by 16 inches and it's horizontal right now if I just relax one of those fingers it drops straight down so you need curvature to impart some structural strength turns out you need curvature also to wrap the vehicle around an object. The BrainCraft mission is to help take out some of the orbital debris on orbit. What I wanted was a spacecraft that could be printed that's ultralight so that if you want to get rid of 5,000 debris objects on orbit, it wouldn't cost you $50 billion. It might cost you $100 million or so. The way you do that, again, is reduce the mass because getting into space is $5,000 to $10,000 a pound. Think of that the next time you order a laptop or something, how much you'd pay to ship that to space. And you want to be able to

print it cheaply. You want to mass produce it you need thousands of these when i was looking at silicon satellites you know i wanted to mass produce these the problem was that this you couldn't get all the electronics and the micro electromechanical systems in silicon with an inexpensive process basically the foundries kept going to smaller and smaller minimum feature sizes so buying or getting time at a foundry became prohibitively expensive. Now, for this thing, we don't use silicon foundries. You can use the foundries that make television displays and monitors. Those are thin-film transistors that are deposited on glass.

We want to use similar techniques to deposit carbon nanotube electronics on plastic. We don't need the same kinds of, what do you call it, accuracies in printing, but we think we can get by with much smaller areas. We're not printing 75-inch televisions here. It's a one-square-meter device that can be broken up into much smaller sheets that you can print in a much smaller foundry. be broken up into much smaller sheets that you can print in a much smaller foundry. The reason I say that is that if you go look at how much a television foundry costs these days, it's $7 billion.

And they're typically in China. I'd like to see more of this in the US at a much cheaper cost. That's one of the possibilities. How would this work to mitigate the debris problem in space, which I know is something aerospace has paid a lot of attention to for years? I spent nine months looking at how you would do this, the mission concept and the concept of operations. The idea is you ship up hundreds to thousands to the space station.

And I chose the space station because it's a good initial starting spot. It's relatively low orbit, so if you have any that don't function for some reason, they'll de-orbit within a month. The ballistic coefficient of these things is very small. Basically, it's got a lot of air drag per unit mass, so it'll come down quickly. Like a solar sail. Like a solar sail, right. If you're above 1,000 kilometers, you don't have to worry about air drag. But even so, this thing would start at the space station. There are six resupply missions per year to the space station. So it's a good staging point to ship

up 100 at a time. And it also turns out the majority of orbital debris in low Earth orbit are at inclinations in excess of 60 degrees. So the space station's at about 57 or so, or 54. So it's not the greatest spot, but it's not a bad spot either. So it's a good place to start. So you'd ship these up, and somebody would have to make the decision, okay, we're going after this piece of space debris. place to start. So you'd ship these up and somebody would have to make the decision, okay, we're going after this piece of space debris. The mass of that debris can be anywhere from one to nine kilograms, depending on what orbit it's in. Big problem in trying to

rendezvous with a piece of space debris is changing your orbit inclination. In terms of the orbital mechanics, that's the hardest thing to to do things in orbit are traveling at like seven and a half kilometers per second if i'm changing my orbit by 30 degrees well you take seven and a half and you multiply by the sine of 30 degrees you know you've got kilometers per second that's a big number if i want to go up 100 kilometers that only takes 50 meters per second so inclination changes are a big deal there are other things like call right ascension to the ascending node those changes are typically done by timing and moving to slightly different orbits they're not done by brute force which factors into the time so these vehicles that you know they'll weigh 100 grams or less the with 200 watts of solar power in these ion engines, they can accelerate at about 0.1 meter

per second squared, which is phenomenal for an electrically propelled system. You're kidding? Because it's such a low mass, right? Correct. Because it's such a low mass. Typical accelerations are millimeters per second or sub millimeter per second squared, sorry. This thing's a hundred times to a,000 times larger than what your typical electrically propelled spacecraft can do. And that gives it unprecedented maneuverability. So it can do these huge inclination changes. If you wanted to use it for space system exploration,

it's got a total delta-v capability slightly in excess of 16 kilometers per second. That means you can visit most of the planets in the solar system and just about every asteroid and come back. The question is, will it survive the Van Allen radiation belts? I haven't done that analysis yet. I've done the low Earth orbit analysis. But if you can get through the belts in a matter of a couple days,

and I have done some simulations that show that this thing does, you know, it leaves the Earth very quickly if you're full bore, if you've got maximum sunlight. So this is potentially a way of exploring thousands of asteroids. But getting back to the debris mission, you start out in low Earth orbit.

It goes up to the target object. And most of that time is spent waiting for the right ascension of the ascending nodes to line up. That can actually take months. You do that ahead of time. You just wait until it's the right time. But typically, it'll take three weeks to go from low Earth, or two weeks to go from low Earth orbit to the target orbit, another week for final matching, and a week or less to take the debris object down. Does that by wrapping itself around the object? Yes, thank you. Left out that part. It's flexible so it turns it can wrap into a cylinder completely surrounding your target object. Now if this is a 1 meter square membrane it can wrap itself

around a 30 centimeter diameter object. So something that's about a foot in diameter. So it can carry big, you know, it can bring down large objects. Most debris objects will probably be smaller due to the mass limits. But again, if it's at a relatively low Earth orbit, it can bring down a nine kilogram object. If you're going up to the high end of low Earth orbit, say 2000 kilometer altitude with a big inclination change, it can bring down one kilogram. So one kilogram is the minimum that it can bring down from anywhere in low Earth orbit. Typically, it's about two or three kilograms. So I'm not the only one fascinated by this. Obviously, NASA has shown interest. What have they done to support this? Well, they funded a phase one effort. Again, this is through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Group.

NIAC. NIAC, which started last spring. The effort ended in January. I submitted a final report in February. And then I submitted a Phase 2 proposal. And the Phase 1 is nine months at $100,000. The new Phase one efforts now, I believe, are being funded at $125,000. So this is a great way to get funding to do off-the-wall, out-of-the-box initial engineering work. The phase two is designed to work out some of the details.

In this case, we want to print some carbon nanotube electronics, some sensors, and to demonstrate the shape-shifting that you need for this. I've gotten some funding through the Aerospace Corporation the last month to test out flexanol actuators. These are muscle wires, titanium nickel alloys. You run a current through it, they heat up, they shrink by 4%. But basically, it curls this sheet into almost a half-cylinder. The limitations of that are that it's thermal. The big problem with these thin spacecraft is they cool off quickly when they go into eclipse. And that forced usage of certain ionic liquid propellants over others,

simply because they would freeze. Now, freezing may not be a bad thing. It'll stay in its shape as it goes through eclipse, simply because they would freeze. Now freezing may not be a bad thing. It'll stay in its shape as it goes through eclipse, but you won't have power, you won't be able to thrust, and I've done some analyses on that. So it may not be a big deal just to let it freeze, but you can't change the shape when it's frozen.

So if we have a liquid propellant that has a very low melting point, you need a melting point of about minus 70 degrees C. That's how cold it gets. There's almost no thermal mass. You may have the same problem with the solar cells getting really cold, but you don't care. You don't have electronics on them. So the muscle wire wouldn't work in eclipse. What I'm going to look at next are electroactive polymers that use an ionic liquid between two electrodes, kind

of like a capacitor. And when you apply a voltage difference, in this case it's only a few volts, that'll separate the negative ions and the positive ions. The negative ions will go to the positive plate, positive ions will go to the negative plate. And if the ions are different in size, the bigger ones will cause that electrode to expand, that size. So the trick is making flexible, electrically conductive electrodes.

And when you apply a few volts, one side will expand, causing the whole thing to curve. And that's exactly what we need for this structure. This is cutting edge. Do you see any major roadblocks given enough time and money to making this happen? Not yet. Again, it's the radiation hardness

is one of the big issues, but that appears to be solvable. The number of holes that gets through it in a month, that looks like it's solvable, but that could be a problem in the long run. But overall, there are engineering solutions to all of this,

as long as you're willing to accept a low technology readiness level at this point. These are not going to fly in five years. Ten years, maybe. It depends how much money you want to put behind it. And if the cleanup of orbital debris becomes a much bigger issue, there may be money behind it. Thank you for this look at the future of spacecraft, Siegfried. You're welcome. Thanks for letting me talk. Aerospace Corporation Senior Scientist Siegfried Janssen

telling us last March about his development of the BrainCraft, which just received a second-phase NIAC grant. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its flexible members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.