Mission to market – The evolution of NASA’s CLPS program 

Time Markers

00:00 – Episode introduction
00:30 – Panel introduction
01:42 – Question for Tim Crain
05:30 – Question for Tim Crain
06:46 – Question for Tyler Mundt
10:14 – Question for Thierry Klein
16:29 – Response by Tim Crain
18:06 – Question for Tim Crain
24:13 – Response by Tyler Mundt
25:11 – Question for Tyler Mundt
26:56 – Response by Tim Crain
28:10 – Question for Thierry Klein
30:47 – Question for Tyler Mundt
32:14 – Response by Tim Crain
33:24 – Question for Tim Crain
34:41 – Question for Tim Crain
37:19 – Question for Tyler Mundt
39:36 – Question for Thierry Klein
42:18 – Question for Thierry Klein
44:48 – Response by Tim Crain
46:16 – Response by Tyler Mundt
47:03 – Question for Tim Crain
49:40 – Response by Thierry Klein
50:25 – Question for Tim Crain
52:48 – Audience Question
58:12 – Audience Question

Transcript – Panel Conversation

David Ariosto – Thank you everybody for joining us. Thanks for this esteemed panel here. We’re going to be talking about some exciting things have been going on in a whole host of capacities, not only in terms of commercial development that has to do with CLPS, but the broader sort of geopolitical context with which this is operating in, and a lot of some of the new innovations, and dare I say, frontier technologies that have been exhibited in the commercial space CLPS, commercial lunar service payload services programs, is it’s been around now for about seven years, which is kind of remarkable. You know, this is sort of a bit of a paradigm shift in terms of the direction of the agency, transitioning a bit from from that of an architect and more that client. I think that’d be fair to say.

But the orientation is obviously been the moon and the growth of sort of a commercially viable space that’s starting now to push out past that near Earth orbit Cislunar space, and develop development of the moon, dare I say, Mars and beyond. So with this esteemed panel here from two machines, Tim and Tyler from ispace and Jerry from Nokia, we’re going to kind of get into the lion’s share of this. But Tim, I want to start with you in the context of CLPS now being seven years old and intuitive machines, having perhaps one of the most public faces of the CLPS program, you’ve had two missions to the moon and you’ve got another one planned. Where do we stand?

Tim Crain – Yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s been seven years, of course. You know, seven years ago, when CLPS started, it wasn’t like there was a host of companies at the starting line in a three point stance, ready to go. So when CLPS was instantiated the concept that commercial companies could fully manage the integration of a spacecraft getting it certified for launch, handling Deep Space Operations, working in the lunar environment, attempting landing, landing, doing surface ops, that whole package not being run by a legacy government institution, but being handed off to a commercial company. That concept was unproven, and there weren’t many organizations out there that were really seriously thinking about that. So it was leadership. So it was leadership from NASA to get it started, and I look at the last seven years as being the demonstration phase of CLPS. Or Is any of that value proposition, from integration to launch to landing? Is any of that really feasible in the commercial world? Can we do it? Or is that still purely the domain of sovereign governments, and we’ve had some success.

We’ve had some challenges, but we have moved the ball forward, and we’re getting close to what I think is going to be the end of the demonstration era, and we move into a regularization. So very soon, we’re going to get all the bugs worked out, not just intuitive machines, but ispace ,Astrobotic, Firefly, and we get into repetitive cadence of these missions at the class we see now. And imagine 234, missions a year, regularly going to the moon, to the point where you go, yeah, those science class missions, they just happen and you’re not. Not remarkable about the transportation anymore. So that will be the next era. We’re moving into that era, and despite the challenges we’ve had in the first phase, I think we’re on our way there, and we’re going to get the things worked out we’ve learned from the experiences we’ve had. The net investment to get to where we are today has been relatively small compared to historical mission prices. Ask how much it would have taken to do four attempts at a science class under landing seven years ago, the number would have been considerably larger than what we’ve actually spent to go do those. So let’s move into the regularization phase, but then the challenge after that is going to be expansion and moving into heavy cargo, moving into taking things to the moon that have an intrinsic value of themselves that’s much, much greater than the transportation. And what I mean by that is it takes a certain amount of investment to get a booster and to build a 100, 200, 300 kilogram capability lander and send that to the moon. Well, now let’s move to a two metric ton, three metric ton lander that does cost more than the first case, but not exponentially.

So it might be double the cost, for example, to get the larger booster to build the larger lander, but the value of putting one or two metric tons of equipment on there could be billions of dollars. Imagine taking a two or three metric ton ISRU plant to the moon. The burden in that expansion phase, where we’re headed in the future is we have to be able to say that at that class, we have a standard of rigor and Mission Success that is commensurate with the payloads, even though the transportation cost at that point becomes much smaller than the value of itself.

David Ariosto – And you mentioned budgets too. So I mean, when we sort of relate to this, I think there’s a broader consensus that we talked about the Apollo program that was 4% of GDP. You’re operating $100 million contract. So this is a wildly different type of contract, and also the nature of where you’re going is very different.

Tim Crain – And that’s those contracts at about that $100 million dollar range includes the booster, right? And so this isn’t like a discovery class, where you see the number and you go, well, the booster is separate in its own bucket. If these CLPS missions are turnkey operations, NASA says, Look, deliver this, operate this, integrate this, launch it, get the range approvals, do your own deep space tracking, and we have to cover all of that. So the standard for all of us is a fully successful landing every time we go. But we’re figuring out. We know the cost is not 4% of the GDP, right? But where is the deck that we go? Look, I can’t go below this, and we’ve been dialing it in. And I think the CLPS program has done a great job of maturing, along with the CLPS providers, in understanding how to structure the contracts and say, All right, we do have to recognize that there’s a level set of if you go below this, the risk profile goes up. So how do we how do we dial that in the right way? That’s been part of the growth of the program, too, right.

David Ariosto – Tyler, I want to get to you because you’re at ispace at two such missions. You’ve got one coming up as well, with regards to to a 2027, mission on the far side, which is, which is terribly exciting in terms of what you’re doing there, in terms of two relay satellites as well as a lander. But all of this is also coming at a moment of important context in terms of the geopolitical construct of this right. And I think the reason that I mentioned this is that one of the criticisms of American space policy has always been sort of the fickle nature of it, in the sense that you have one policy and then it shifts depending on the administration, the politics and Congress, and how that sort of all plays out, while one of America’s chief geopolitical rivalries might move a little bit slower, but has maybe more consistent guide of leadership. And so in the context of that CLPS which 2027 will be your first mission, is one of these rare exceptions, seemingly in the sense that it spans three administrations. 2018 it’s still here. Began in the Trump administration, right through the Biden administration. It’s still here with the Trump administration again. So, you know, I was hoping you can maybe speak to the importance of continuity and the broader confidence that the broader public has within this, within this broader structure.

Tyler Mundt – Yeah, I think what’s what’s really interesting about CLPS that enables it to kind of survive all those administrations is at its foundation. It is enabling competition within the United States, right? You you commercial. You’re trying to stimulate the commercial market, and inherently, you’re driving the cost for these missions and cost for those services and what the customers are ultimately paying for, which is their data on the lunar surface. You’re driving that down. You’re forcing a lot more investment from these entities themselves. For instance, I spaces actually invested $150 million of our own because we do have to do things like cover the cost of launch services and things like that. So NASA’s i. But the foundation of CLPS and being able to span those administrations, I think, comes down to to competition, and in doing so across multiple administrations, from task order to task order, as long as we’re raising the bar and asking for more and pushing what those requirements are, I think we continue to drive more competition, more innovation, more unique solutions. In our first mission as part of Team jumper commercial mission, one set for 2027 is an example of that. Now going to the far side of the moon, which does not have direct line of sight to Earth.

David Ariosto – Speak to us a little bit about that in terms of those challenges.

Tyler Mundt – Yeah. So on the lunar surface, there are multiple lunar days and lunar night cycles, but the moon is tidally locked, so the far side does not have direct line of sight for RF communications to talk to earth ground stations directly. And so you can approach that problem a number of different ways. And the way that I space did it with Draper as part of the CP 12 contract within CLPS was to carry a pair of communication relay satellites during transit, and we’re actually going to drop them off in lunar orbit prior to touchdown. So we’ll have those birds in lunar orbit ready to go, then we touch down and then transmit all of our communications through those satellites during service operations, and then they will remain in lunar orbit for years to come. So not just focusing on service operations, but actually expanding a communications network to lunar service that is, I mean.

David Ariosto – That’s a perfect transition to Thierry, because, I mean, when we talk about communication services, you’re the guy on this stage. Let’s, let’s talk about that, but let’s also talk about the nature of what constitutes success, right? Because I think you and I were talking about this earlier, that sometimes this is almost this like binary construct of mission success or mission failure, and nothing in between. That doesn’t necessarily play out in terms of the actual science, the technology and some of the demonstrations, but speak to us a little bit about im two and what you were able to achieve there.

Thierry Klein – So let me maybe first say a bit. Why are we as as Nokia, as a as a telecom company? Why am I here? And why are we excited about this area and and why do we work with with intuitive machines on the im two mission? I think we started looking in 2018 we started looking at space exploration and thinking about all the division and the ambition that everybody had for going into going into space, going to the moon. And we realized none of this will actually happen without communication and and we as Nokia, were global networking infrastructure company, probably some of you had Nokia phones. We don’t make Nokia phones anymore, but we built a network infrastructure. And anytime you make a call, you make a wireless connection, you have broadband at home, you’re probably touching Nokia equipment at some point. So we said, if, if all the missions need communication, why are we not in this space, and why are we not in this market? Why are we not bringing the technologies that we have to bear and knowing that we launched the first communication satellite as Bell Labs in 1962 but we haven’t really done anything in space in the last 2030, years. So we’re the communication experts, but we don’t really know anything about space. But how can we work together? And as part of the tipping point program that NASA we teamed up with Tim and his team, I said, how do we prove that you can actually take the cellular technologies that we all use every day?

How can we prove that we can take those technologies and adapt them, leverage all the investments that the telecom industry has made, leverage the standards based technologies, but adapt them and re-conceptualize what a network looks like when you operate it in in this really harsh environment. And so coming back to your question on success. Success for us is proving that we can actually do this. And sure, the im two mission was not everything we wanted to do, but we’ve proven that we can take cellular technology, we can build it in network in the form factor that swap optimized, can handle some radiation, can handle the temperature, can handle the mechanical stresses of putting this on a rocket, typically a Nokia network, or any telecom network, doesn’t sit on a falcon nine, right? So for us, even getting to a lunar surface, proving that we survived launch, transit, landing, and we could operate the network, even if it was for a short period of short period of time, is a success. So proving that we’re taking this step forward, that this is a viable path to take commercial cellular technologies and adapt them for space is possible. And we said failure is if we don’t learn anything on this mission. So as long as we learn something, we progress, we get some data back. And the fact that we operate the network on the lunar surface is a huge success. Could we have done more? Sure, but have we done a lot?

David Ariosto – Absolutely, you know, I find that so interesting the context of like you mentioned, 1962 in terms of launching commercial satellite. And I think there’s. Almost expectation in the broader public sometimes that technology simply advances by dint of its own momentum. And it doesn’t quite work that way. It requires individuals to go out and make this happen. But in terms of what you created, this is shrinking down a communications network, basically cellular network, to that of a pizza box, that they can kind of withstand the vibrations of a falcon nine extreme temperature swings. And then we didn’t even get about the nature of, like, what an infrastructure grid might look like, the data requirements, the processing requirements on orbit, because it’s, it’s not just about communications, right? It’s about just being able to process that, that data in situ, sort of that edge computing construct. And it just strikes me that we’re at the vanguard now of all of this sort of Germany, if there’s political wherewithal for it.

Thierry Klein – Yeah, and I think coming from, from Bell Labs, we’re, you know, we’re the research organization of Nokia, so we’re, we’re always advancing. We’re always pushing the boundary. And so for us, this was, how can we build that extreme network? How do we optimize it from a hardware and software perspective, to fit a form factor that that we need? So it is, it is, size, weight, power optimized. We’ve, we’ve not really done a lot of work on how you send bits and bytes that is standards, standard capability, but we’ve done a lot of engineering on how do you shrink that form factor? How do you harden it from a mechanical perspective, how do you handle temperature? How do you handle the operation of the network? Because we want that network to be completely autonomous. It can function as soon as it touches down. The network is operational, self healing, self configuring, self managing. We can control it from Earth and we can intervene. But we really want that network to be, to be self x, because we think any, any robotic mission by definition, doesn’t have technicians who can intervene and so forth. And even if you have astronauts, their crew time is so precious.

You don’t want them to to be network technicians. It should really be drop and forget. So we’ve done a lot of work in that direction as well and but we also know that there is more capabilities we need. And I think Tim mentioned earlier when we chatted, if we get beyond lunar night, we need to take care of some of those capabilities. We the radiation aspect, if we stay longer than two weeks on the moon, how do we handle the radiation capabilities? And those are the areas that we need to work together. And we are not the experts on that we’re learning, but this is where we’re excited about being part of this industry to collaborate on those challenges, because it’s the communication capabilities. But then what does it mean from a system perspective and from an operational capability?

Tim Crain – There’s a commercial aspect of this. I want to tug on a little bit too. Terry mentioned that the Nokia payload was a tipping point payload, and so behind the scenes, what had happened is when CLPS came out with the prime one contract, they first asked the CLPS pool. Hey, we’ve got a payload we want to take to the moon. It may not be a full manifest, so we may only take a third or a half of your land or capacity. Do the economics of that work for you. So they actually surveyed the field first, and enough of us responded, yeah, we would take a partial payload and we would then demonstrate that we could fill the rest of that manifest outside of the CLPS program. Now granted tipping point, still a NASA program, but we signed up for we’ll take about 45% of our capacity on a CLPS payload, and we’ll go and commercially figure out how to fill the rest. And that’s when Nokia came to us, serendipitously and said, Well, we would like to go after this tipping point. Would you support us? So they were actually the ones who wrote the proposal to NASA to do the com demonstration, and we supported them as their transport. But when we flew im two, only about 45% of that was a CLPS payload, and the rest was Nokia and some other payloads we had. And so the premise behind the purpose of CLPS, we talk about the evolution of CLPS of NASA, wanting to be one customer, but not the only customer. In this case, the CLPS program, is it possible to fill the rest of a payload on a kind of a two year time interval and not a five year time interval? That was a success commercially, that was a success to prove that that model could work.

David Ariosto – I think that, to me, is like the million dollar question, does this work if someone other than taxpayers are on the hook? It’s not clear yet, but I do remember someone mentioning to me that if China is there, the market will follow, so to speak, in terms of the geopolitical competition that is an impetus behind a lot of this. But let’s get into im two just a little bit more in terms of that last mission, because I don’t know that you could have picked a more difficult spot in the solar system to land a spacecraft. And I don’t know that this is fully quite appreciated. I mean. Temperature swings that drop in some areas below that of Pluto in the in the context of some of those, those craters with eternal darkness there, with some of that water ice, expect to be trapped. So, you know, you have problems of eternal blackness. You have wild temperature swings. You have just the basic comms issues as well. And all the while, you’re operating with an autonomous craft that you’re losing comms with as it kind of goes into that lunar descent. So maybe kind of paint a little bit more of a picture, not only in terms of how difficult it is, but why there.

Tim Crain – Well, there’s some unique physical features of the lunar South Pole. It is more rugged, so you have a lot more vertical relief, extreme shadows, the solar illumination basically hovers on the horizon continuously, only a few handful of degrees because of the extreme elevation. That means you get periods where it drops behind mountains and ridges and craters and goes away for months, and then times where you’re fully illuminated for months. That repeats on guess what, a 17 year cycle. So it’s not like a mid latitude region, which is basically the same every 14 days. We have to handle all of that. We have to look at how we the thermal management on the moon is not to be trifled with. It’s a big deal, but it really puts the pressure on precision landing.

As we were coming in for our landing, we knew we had an issue with our altimeter, and it might not come on board. So getting the altitude right at the final stage was something we were worried about, but we were also worried about our lateral precision landing, because as you see the videos of us coming in, it’s very bright, it’s very dark, it’s very bright, it’s very dark, and if we don’t land on the postage stamp of the illuminated plateau of Mons baton, then the mission’s over. You could land perfectly, but you landed just past the range and you hit the dark spot, no solar energy, no solar energy, or you go past it and you land on the other side of a ridge. So the pressure is really on for precision landing. To say you’re threading the needle and you’re coming in, I will brag on our comms, though, we didn’t lose comms on im two, the experience we had with our communication systems on im one, we played those four dim two, and even when we had the dynamic landing that we had, even then, we never lost comms. Yeah, it was, it was there the whole time. So that part proved out. Hey, go and then go again and pay for the lessons you made on the first one by being more successful in a second.

David Ariosto – But these are, these are autonomous systems. I mean, there’s no Neil Armstrong that’s sort of peering out the window and eyeing adjustments, no.

Tim Crain – And it’s, it’s not even like the seven minutes of terror, the 12 minutes of terror that the Mars probes have, where you’d have a 20 minute time delay, and so you don’t know till it’s all over. Yeah, you’re watching it in real time, but you can’t touch it, so you button up the vehicle one or two revs before it goes down, and you trust that all the testing you’ve done and the autonomous systems will manage. It’s about a 15 minute burn, and you watch the data play out.

David Ariosto – So we handle how, but why there? Because, I mean, ostensibly, there’s questions of water on the rise, right, which, through electrolysis, can be converted either into fuel or breathable oxygen or water. For cooling systems, all sorts of mineral resources, potentially questions about helium three, ideal fusion reactor fuel, but more importantly, cooling for quantum systems, there’s that question, though, about transport to market, right? And, like, is there? And this, I think, is really the crux of, like, the questions of commercial viability of lunar surface, particularly when it comes to extracting what’s there. Like, can you get that stuff and bring it to market at a price point that makes it so profitable for the company.

Tim Crain – Well, definitely we have to scale if we’re gonna do that. And Tyler, you kind of alluded to this when you’re talking about bringing data back with the relay satellites. The value of space is what you bring back from it. And in the early phases of CLPS, it’s data, right? All this data we’re bringing back, but we’re gonna have to evolve past that and bring kilograms, not kilobytes, back from the moon. And then to do that, you’re going to have to move into this expansion phase where, you know the rocket equation is real tough. And if I want to land something that can come all the way back, I need more than a few 100 kilograms. I need to be able to land more than that. And so that that is going to have to happen for us to close the economic cycle with the moon and benefit life back here to be able to bring those things back. Now there’s some exciting things happening adjacent to CLPS with the lunar terrain vehicle, where you begin talking about a permanent surface asset, autonomous surface asset, on the moon, and you begin to thinking about multi missions.

So now imagine an LTV on the south pole and CLPS riders are delivering resupply and new technology to that LTV over a 10 year life that helps us scale too. Where we get out of a mission is what I can put in one spacecraft, one launch vehicle, and go, and that’s all I can do. No think about it more now, like the ISS. Where we continue to send things to this asset, and we do more and more with it. Well, now we’re on the surface, so I think all those pieces get there. You’re absolutely right. We have to target a point in the future, though, where we’re bringing material back. And I don’t like to say sample, I don’t like to say lunar sample return. You know, sample kind of has a, like a small scale dabbling aspect to it. I want to bring lunar material, material when you talk to your lawyers, material is important. So I want to bring lunar material back.

Tyler Mundt – Tyler, you can jump in. Yeah. And maybe, just to add to that, I think developing that infrastructure is nothing that any of us up here are going to solve as individual companies. It’s going to take the broader community, because it is hard to fight physics and the rocket equation, and you’re going to need things like more capable launch vehicles, or you start bringing in otvs into the equation. And so to get to that scaling point, when we get out of this demonstration phase, we kind of need to be ready as a community and evolve together to make sure that we’re trying to have more propulsive capability to actually carry that mass and bring it back.

Tim Crain – Interoperability is something that, you know, we talk about a lot, and NASA has shown leadership and interoperability with the (unintelligible) and the Luna net standards. But it’s not just a good idea. It’s something we have to do. We can’t afford to be totally even in a commercial world, totally encapsulated with just our own systems. And, you know, have VHS and beta, you know, they all have to play.

David Ariosto – Well, I mean in terms of that, and not only terms of the infrastructure that you’re building, and, you know, the sort of exploratory mechanisms for commercial viability, but just expanse where you’re going. I mean two missions in terms of the South Pole region, you know, going to the far side in 2020, 2027 you had Firefly aerospace that landed at, I think, mid latitude positions. And I think, I mean, there’s just, like, if you take a step back, there’s this sense that it that certain strategic positions all around the moon are now being exploited or evaluated for potential use in terms of not only supporting Artemis, but just the broader sense of commercial viability that all this is meant to bring. And then, I guess my question is like, then what? What does that portend like? Where does that bring us next? Once we have the hum of some industry up there in a meaningful way, where does that take us?

Tyler Mundt – Yeah, I think the first step would be to try and standardize a lot of these interfaces across payloads so that we can make it more accessible, right? The more we can lower the barrier to entry for the commercial market, the more viable it’s going to be long term. So it’s been a challenge to try and come up with these platform vehicles that can accommodate various requirements associated with landing sites or with the payloads themselves, trying to develop very modular accommodations and some instruments want access to the lunar regolith. Some want new factors of deep space for radiative services. So to come up with a singular platform where you’re trying to reuse it, let’s say, 80% of the time, from mission to mission, so that you can get your amortization to close on the funding side. I think that’s the first step so that we can make it more accessible overall.

Tim Crain – Yeah, and we are not the market CLPS We’re not the market, we’re the infrastructure. So we have to bring that price point down and the confidence up when you look at the birth of E commerce, you know you’re at an era where all of a sudden, the cost of a Linux backbone and the infrastructure that existed there to run an Apache server, the cost of having a server farm that you could rent and lease when the capability existed there. Now the innovators came in and said, Okay, this is how I’m gonna do business with that. And it was, it was close enough the price points weren’t where they are today, for sure, but it were close enough that people could close their business case and go, Well, I can count on it, and I know what it is. Now I’m gonna be innovative outside. So in this model, I space intuitive machines our competitors in the pool, we’re the Apache servers and the backbone for E commerce. We need those innovators to come in once we’ve proven that we’re reliable, once we understand our cost points in a way that aren’t as boutique from mission to mission. And I can’t tell you necessarily what the total business case for our customers will be, but it’s on us to provide that foundation.

David Ariosto – You know, in that same vein, what I thought was so interesting in recent years was just the the understanding that Toyota has a space program right then, and almost using this as a bit of a test case, in the sense that you you’re starting to see non traditional programs, companies that are devoting more and more resources to space consumer retailers using, say, Max R technologies, or those from planet to kind of scour consumer traffic patterns during the holidays to get a sense of their, you know, their corporate intelligence rivals in that sense. So it’s like this. Nature of this divide between what is space and what is not. Space is changing, and cliffs strikes me as like almost this little bit of a lighthouse effect in terms of the initial push being that of government, and then maybe getting out of the way, and then pushing it further and maybe getting out of the way. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach that point with the moon. It’s, I mean, that’s, a very high bar in terms of where, where you’re thinking of getting to, but, you know, in terms of what Nokia is doing and what other commercial service providers. Because, you know, back in the 1960s I wouldn’t have, not, I wouldn’t have thought of Nokia as, you know, as part of the, you know, the Boeing structure of legacy space companies. But very much are, and actually were in different capacities.

Thierry Klein – So if you think about what, what Tim and Tyler talked about from the infrastructure right now, every mission that goes to goes into space, or goes to to the moon or cislunar, brings their communication capabilities with them. But if you keep going back to the same region or same you have a moon base, and you have these assets that are there. Why would you have everybody bring their own communication capabilities when you travel to the other side of the world, if you go to Australia, you’re not bringing your network with you, you’re bringing your phone with you, and you connect to infrastructure that’s there. So as we’re deploying more and more assets that stay in the same region for long periods of time. Why would you not have comms infrastructure to be part of that and and so we kind of think of, how does the model that we used to providing communication services on Earth, how does that evolve for space and and you can see all the parallels that maybe initially, we bring our network because we’re exploring a new area that nobody’s been to. Now we go a second time. Maybe we bring our network with us again, but the third time we go there, maybe we should leave the asset for future missions to come and connect to it. So you can imagine a lunar service provider and lunar data plants in the future, not now, not next five years, but I think that’s where this is going from. You have power infrastructure, you have transport infrastructure. You should have communication infrastructure.

David Ariosto – You know, I think what immediately comes to mind in that sense, is there are certain technological hurdles that have to be overcome in terms of operating communications system, data processing on the moon, purely landing there, putting relay satellites on the far side. All these things require these technological hurdles. Some areas are more complicated and not others, but once they’re surmounted, and we’ve seen already how difficult is to land, particularly on the lunar South Pole, is there now a question of the utility of not reinventing the wheel every time we do this, and yet, also, because this is a commercially driven effort, there’s an IP concern. So you know, how you square that circle is, I mean, I think that’s a real question. Now.

Tyler Mundt – Yeah, it’s absolutely a balancing act, right? We are somewhat competitors in the space, but we are also rooting for each other at the same time, rising tide is going to lift lift all these ships. And an interesting thing that came out of ispace Japan’s mission one and mission two was how public we were with the successes and the failures, right? We want the broader community to learn exactly what happened, so that we don’t repeat those, whether part of a CLPS program or any other commercial program. So I think transparency, wherever we can, would be great. I think it also goes back to some standard payload interfaces, but there it is a tough balancing act between trying to be transparent and trying to keep, you know, some of that competitive

Tim Crain – drive going, but you’ll see that in a maturing industry, right is right now we’re all very heads down. We got our systems. I gotta get our systems to work. I gotta get to a fully successful landing. Ispace has their heads down. They’re trying to get it as that goes along. In fact, I’m on the supply chain panel tomorrow, and we’ll talk about some of this. Anytime you’re building space systems, you do a make buy decision. You know, through there on those subsystems, we’ll begin as we see our competitors repetitively, be successful. As they see us repetitively, be successful. We’ll say something like, I space your cameras. You guys are really doing a, you know, good job with that. Can we license those, you know, can, can we in the pool find the way to and that’s a that’s the indication of a mature industry. When competitors start coming to each other and saying, Hey, I would like to use what you’re using, or they come to im and they go while your radio systems really work well, they’re already integrated. Can we license that and put those back in? And the great thing about those models is they exist terrestrially across industries. There’s nothing unique to space about how do we be more efficient as an industry? So once we once, we kind of get over the hump of these, these early days and early challenges, I think you’ll see that pick up.

David Ariosto – It’s also a public confidence question, right? Yeah, because if you have just one company that’s landing on the lunar south pole, and there’s a CLPS program, however, you know, however small these budgets are relative to those Apollo program numbers, you know, we’ve seen that there’s a degree of political expediency in terms of, you know, identifying the things where. Where cuts might be made. And so if you can, it just strikes me that if you can, you want to be competitive, right? I mean, I’ve known you, Tim, for quite some time. Now, I know you’re a competitive guy, but I also know that it seems that this doesn’t work unless it’s a viable competition amongst several players.

Tim Crain – For sure, the competition is a stressor, because it keeps you on your toes. It really is to the benefit of the taxpayer for there to be multiple successful companies. I know when we write a proposal to submit to CLPS, it’s all right, what is it really going to cost us? How can we both be most successful? Boy, I wonder what I space is going to do. So how do we, how do we that pressure makes us give our best offer, not just technically, but on price too. Yeah, very healthy for the for the community, for the American taxpayer, to have that competition in the pool that we’re always trying to make sure that we’re doing the best offer we can.

David Ariosto – And not just domestically, either. I mean, I would, I would venture to say that part of the germination of CLPS program, back in 2018 was this growing recognition of what China was doing with the qingham program, in the sense that, you know, there’s a rivalry there, but does it have to be, does it have to be an enemy kind of construct, or can it be a healthy competition that kind of pushes the nature of humanity’s expansiveness further than it might have existed without, without that competition? That’s a hard question to answer, given the nature of IP theft and all these other things that kind of engage on both sides of Pacific here. But I think there’s, there’s a man, even I dare I say, almost like a silver lining that can be gleaned in the sense that it was a wake up call in the sense that we got to get this done, but maybe, maybe leverage a more commercially based system. And that, to me, strikes me as like one of the foundational differences between the two systems, a state approach from Beijing, which tends to heal a bit more towards that Apollo era structure. And this new, you know, I say new. It’s not that new anymore, but this, you know, relatively new, commercially backed approach in which, you know, viable markets can start to push with, you know, with maybe the tacit approval, backing of taxpayers in Washington.

Tim Crain – And that confidence, that confidence that we’re looking to get, to give to the public our successes and our failures inform that I know every time that we would watch a lunar landing mission attempt, space il ispace Astrobotic, we would take notes. And if they had had a challenge, we would take the notes from that, and we’d go back and compare it to our systems and go, Okay, are we susceptible here? What are we doing? Let’s make sure we look at that again. When Firefly was successful. We went back and said, Okay, we had an altimeter problem. What altimeter did they use? You know, let’s go look at that. Seemed to work. And so even though it’s not one program directing all of these companies, we’re all observing each other and seeing what’s working and how it’s going, where we have a lunar communications network that we’re deploying for NASA under the nsns contract. We’re going to watch ispace very closely and see what lessons they learned that we can glean and look for interoperability there. So I think that, you know, I’m a football guy, you might not be surprised to know that, but the forward pass, somebody started the forward pass, it was successful, and now it’s all across. It’s all across that sport. So as elements of the CLPS program, CLPS field, become more successful, we’ll imitate each other a little bit, and then we’ll ask each other to help us, and we’ll work together.

David Ariosto – You know, you mentioned the altimeter problem. I think that was, you know, one of the nicest kind of understatements of the night, in a sense, but what I think that speaks to and and Tyler, maybe you can talk to this as well, is that it’s not just the sort of the technology, and it’s not just the commercial ecosystem that’s developing here, but a lot of this has to do with the people that are making the decisions and and are fixing these problems in real time. A lot of it comes from some that old NASA DNA that just sort of fanned out. But, you know, it almost strikes me is that we have this kind of science and engineering free market that’s starting to emerge now in a way that maybe we didn’t see 1020, years ago, in the sense that you have a lot of that operational structure and DNA that sort of baked into a talent pool that’s now thinking, Well, you know, maybe I can start my own company, or maybe the operational DNA is there to kind of go out and pursue these things, because the launch, the launch variables, are not quite as pricey as they used to be. And so this broader democratization of the space that’s fed by this enormous talent pool that’s stemming from NASA and other places, just it’s sort of a unique aspect of all this.

Tyler Mundt – Yeah, and when you’re approaching a lot of these task orders and coming up with these various solutions, you’re trying to draw on as many perspectives as you can to come up with the approach that is low cost but most robust and highest quality for that end customer. And it’s a unique position that NASA has had to take as. Part of the evolution of CLPS, right? They went from owning all these missions to now procuring it as a service, essentially. So to take on a customer role, it’s a challenging transition, but it would be a missed opportunity to still not tap into that knowledge base. And I think I’ve been able to see a lot of these task orders mature firsthand from many years ago, just in terms of how the requirements were written, how the contracts were structured, to where they are today, are vastly different, and you can see a lot of those not just lessons learned, but corrective actions actually implemented on these subsequent proposals, where there are now avenues to tap into that, whether that be just their industry knowledge or test facilities or various other best practices and lessons learned from these missions. So creating those avenues allows us to formally learn from each other as well.

David Ariosto – Yeah. And I think to that point though, that there is this, there is a kind of a loose organizing structure to some of this, which tends to veer towards Artemis in the sense that the imperative is to return astronauts to the lunar surface. And Terry, this actually might be a good place for you to chime in here, because your next mission with, with, with is Artemis three, with this axiom, communications, spacesuit, sort of apparatus that that you’re devising, which I would think being able to communicate up there in terms of, you know, not only sort of the base structure of autonomous systems, but the astronauts themselves being communicate is foundational. So, like, what? What are you running into, like, what challenges in terms of devising that, that kind of, that kind of architecture?

Thierry Klein – Yeah, indeed, we’ve, we’ve announced about a year ago that we’re working with axiom on integrating cellular capabilities into their their next gen space suits. This really demonstrated on the Artemis three mission. And architectural is very similar to what we what we did on the im two mission. It’s an evolution of the system, but now it has the additional complexity that we we integrate into the suits. Now we are connecting voice capabilities, we’re connecting helmet mounted cameras. We’re connecting biometric data from the astronauts. And I think it’s a completely different level on the integration. It’s a completely different level from a from a safety perspective, but it really gets to, how do we, and I think one of you talked about this earlier, how do we get more information and more data back to Earth on what’s going on on the moon? And we would all want to the general public, but I think the operations team, the scientists, would all want to see what the astronauts are seeing.

We don’t want to get pictures back, you know, a week later and then develop film after we get it. We don’t want black and white, grainy videos and images coming back. But we want in real time to see what the astronauts are seeing. We want to be able to direct them. Maybe they’re looking at something, and then the the scientist on on Earth sees there is another area that’s more interesting. Want to, in real time redirect them. So I think it’s, it’s really bringing that, that real time situation awareness, yeah, but for us, it’s a next step of, how do we prove the technology? How do we evolve it to support more complex operations and EVAs over a long period of time, longer, longer range. But really, I think the mission critical aspect, no offense to rovers and hoppers. We want them to survive. But I think when you’re talking about astronauts, it’s a different level of safety and security that we need to address.

David Ariosto – And yet, and yet, there’s also a bottleneck question, I would think, right? I mean, there’s only so much that despite the creation of all these relay satellites, I imagine there’s a question of processing, and you’re like, what can you do there? What, you know, what, what, what analysis that you can, you can do with some of these new sort of AI fueled systems, what processing, what storage can you do on the lunar surface? And, you know, I am one actually had the makings I am to to, actually had the makings of a lunar data network that was, I think it was beginning to be forged here.

Thierry Klein – And I think that’s, that’s how, let’s say a Space Network has to evolve, that if we now have all these capabilities on the lunar surface to not just send kilobits per second, but megabits per second of data, gigabits per second of data that you can collect and share on the lunar surface. How do you bring that back? So there’s two. What do you do with all that data? So one is, you need to increase the pipe and the communication link back from space to Earth. So how do you go from megabits per second to gigabits, 10s, hundreds of gigabits per second on connecting moon to Earth with much larger bandwidth. But then the other question is, do you really want to send everything back to process the data on on the ground and saying, oh, everything’s fine, versus you do edge computing and you look do local processing on the surface, where you now augment your communication network with computing networks. And again, this mirrors what you see in terrestrial networks. You can send everything. Into a data center, but you can also process information locally on your device or in your in your your company, your enterprise, your industrial premise. And I think we’ll see the evolution, but it’s it’s an evolution of technology, but it’s also an evolution of mindset that right now, we want to see everything on Earth. We’re not comfortable just saying everything’s fine on the moon. Just tell me when there is an when there is an anomaly or or something in the data that doesn’t make sense. So I think we see that bringing more data back, but also processing more locally, running AI analytics algorithms on the on the surface, on the data. And when you get to if you think even further ahead on Mars, you just can’t do it because you have the long, long delay, and by the time the data comes back, it’s it’s probably obsolete. So you will need to have these local compute capabilities. On moon, maybe you can still send some stuff back and react. But on Marc, you absolutely have no, no no chance of real time control.

Tim Crain – I’d like to pull a little bit Terry of what you were talking about for technology readiness level. And when you’re executing a deep space, a lunar mission, a Mars mission, and you have a conversation with a component provider, and they have not had experience in that domain before, you’re looking at the standard aerospace toolkit of, Okay, what’s your call program? What am I going to do in my acceptance testing? How am I going to integrate this into the system? You’re looking at the kind of the regular playbook. But when you go to someone like Nokia and you say, hey, I want to integrate your communication systems in, and they go, Great, I have lunar experience. No, 23 minutes. Okay, but nonetheless, they have lunar experience, and the context of that conversation is so much richer with a supplier who’s demonstrated their technology in that environment, not just the badge of TRL nine, but being able to say, well, these are the changes we’re making because of our experience in that domain, and then going forward and saying, Well, we had, we had operations experience on the moon, not only moving to get there, but now past that, here’s how we’re going to help Artemis and every time I space flies a mission, their component providers are now getting closer and closer we may talk to them in our supply chain, that rich conversation now of well, in the domain environment, it’s not just the star visit TL nine, it’s those. Hey, want to talk to you about how this is really going to work on my system. It really, it really pushes capability forward big way.

Tyler Mundt – I think that’s an interesting thing with CLPS, too. Or we thought it was going to stimulate the commercial market in terms of instruments or customers for a lot of these payloads. What it’s really done is stimulate our supply chain, the amount of providers we now have for propulsion systems or power generation and control or communication systems, even things like when we’re trying to tackle these infrastructure problems together, you’re getting reached out by ground station networks that are trying to figure out what their next capital investment is going to be for various antennas. Right? Are we moving away from S band to go to Ka? They’re trying to see what that next step is going to be for their customers, which are us as the provider. So it’s interesting that CLPS has really stimulated the supply chain and gotten a lot of these suppliers up to a TRL nine and flight used.

David Ariosto – Well, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I think the nature of its stimulation, both in terms of where the commercial lunar services market will go and the terrestrial supply chains are really a fascinating point. But I wonder, though, in the context of in the context of Artemis, there is that it seems like the guiding principle in terms of what CLPS is supposed to support long term and yet there are real questions in terms of the broader long term structure of arguments. You know the future of Gateway, the lunar orbiting station. You know nature of Orion and heat shield problems, the you know the questions of of you know the longevity of SLS, and you know how commercial landing services will actually kind of play out with sort of those inter operating part, interoperating parts. And so given that, given that, you know, those, those question marks that still kind of hang over, over what’s, what CLPS is, as opposed to Ultimate Support, Tim, you and I were kind of talking about this earlier, that there seems to be still a path forward, almost irregard, of what, what happens with regard to Artemis in terms of least what I just described, but in terms of the growing commercial sector, the nature of geopolitical competition that is driving, sort of a broader awareness of why we’re doing this. I wonder if you can, you can address that in terms of the broader scope of what we’re looking at long term.

Tim Crain – So you can, you can project a future of how does Artemis deliver people to the moon? What structure does that take? Is it the current plan is advertised with people in the late 2020s, getting up there? Is it reformulated into more of a pure commercial play? Is it somewhere in between in a transition? Does it slip out some of my. Of time or not, that that will sort itself out. But there’s a large amount of work to do on demonstrating technologies for operating on the surface, for ISRU, for survive the night, for communications. There are foundational things that if we want to get to a sustained human presence on the moon, that work needs to be done. I would say self servingly. Double Down on CLPS right, amplify what we’re doing there, and let’s build up that body of knowledge and expertise so that when Artemis comes out, we’ll be ready. But it’s not like I don’t know six more CLPS missions, all the work’s gonna be done, and we’re ready for people. There’s nothing else to do. There’s a lot of work to be done to really fully utilize, develop, learn and appreciate the moon. We don’t need to wait for Artemis to have the definitive, final plan for us to fill in that knowledge gap.

Thierry Klein – Well, in the last just, just add, I mean, you, you, you mentioned we have the the Artemis three mission. So yeah, that gives the impression maybe while we’ve done I am two as one CLPS mission. Now we’re going on Artemis three, and we’re fine. I would absolutely support what, what Tim said. We are looking to get more shots on goal and have more missions that we’re can be part of. So we can advance the capabilities. We can test, we can demonstrate, we can learn, because you can’t just be I am two to Artemis three, and then everything’s done. So as though, as much as we only announced the Artemis three mission, we are definitely interested in, and maybe that’s a call to anybody, if, if you’re interested in talking to us about communication, we’re definitely interested in exploring collaboration opportunities.

David Ariosto – Well, in the nine minutes that we have is going to open this up to to questions. But before I did, I just, I wanted to sort of relay what one of the, you know, lead propulsion folks, Rob Moore, Moore had, sort of it related to me earlier in that, in the sense that, you know, when I looked at Odie, and you look at the Met locks, engines that you had had developed, you know, some of these are some of the innovations that CLPS, you know, helped engineer. There’s, there are, there’s a reason why you went with metal locks. And there’s, there’s a reason why the destruction that you have with some aerodynamic aids and adjustments, the engineering, you know, I don’t know that that CLPS would be like Coontz with Mars, you’d have to think of a different, different set of set of letters here, in terms of where that might go, in terms of the next iteration of where we’ll go toward Mars. But I think that’s, that’s what a lot of people are talking about long term, when you sort of see this broader push out into into into space, as with the government as sort of a as a leapfrogging entity, and commercial commercialization catching up. I don’t know if you wanted to.

Tim Crain – Definitely we have our NASA DNA taking long term at intuitive machines, and the methalox engine had its origins in if I’m going to go to Mars and make my own fuel, methane is the way to go. I would contend that if you’re going to go explore the asteroids, methane is also what you want. So I view the methylox propulsion technology as kind of like the small block v8 of solar system exploration. I would like to see a miner on an asteroid, grimy, dirty, loading their goods into their transport vehicle, and it’s got an im Marc seven propulsion module on it that runs on wet oxygen and dirty methane. So for us, you know, we looked at a lander, says 90% of what a lander does, it has to manage delta V, and we need a lot of it to be successful. And so building it around the prop system and having in our community the expertise for methalox, it met the immediate need. But if I look far forward, you know, if all we’ve done for CLPS is is make TRL nine, restartable, cryogenically managed, high thrust, high efficiency, methyl X propulsion, that’s been a good investment.

David Ariosto – So from CLPS to Mars, I think that’s a good place to leave it. Let’s, um, let’s go to question me, circulating the microphone around. If anyone has any questions in the audience in the last six and a half minutes, that half minutes that we have.

Audience Question – Good morning. I am Regina Blue. I am the Deputy programmatic manager for CLPS at JFC, and it was all I could do to not just pull my chair up on that stage. So I have a statement, and then I have a question. And so my statement is that the CLPS program is absolutely put together to spur the American economy. That’s an important distinction to make. We CLPS. All of our task orders are awarded to companies resident in America, we do not, unlike ISS, have any international partnerships or task orders. So I wanted to put that out, because I don’t need Congress at my door auditing while we’re playing using taxpayer dollars outside of the US. So that’s very important to make. That distinction. I heard it a couple of times, and I just kind of cringed. The next question I have, presumably for Dr crane, who represents intuitive machines for us, is notwithstanding the task order awards that we already have committed to in terms of our rftps, what would be the one other investment that you would say the government needs to make to continue the forward progress for CLPS. And by the way, I appreciate the flat collaboration across American companies and commercial companies that is the goal of CLPS. So that’s my question for Tim.

Tim Crain – Well, thanks for putting me on the spot. I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw it back to CLPS. And this is something that I’ve been percolating around for a while. One of the things we’ve noticed is that the CLPS appetite for payloads has expanded to fill what our landers can do. And so, you know, we can fly 130 150 kilograms on a nova sea lander. Nova sea lander. The task orders have come out, and their CLPS is loading it up. They’re saying, we want, we want all that. And we’re constantly evaluating, okay, when is the right time for me to take a now high TRL system and advance the capability forward? So one of the things that would help us is a strong market signal or some structuring that allowed us to make those expansions into the higher echelons of payload, and we’re seeing some of that. But my pet project, Regina, is I would like to see some CLPS task orders come out, which says, Yeah, you got to deliver our 200 kilograms of payload. You also have to reserve 100 kilograms for commercial payloads in this proposal. Because what that does now is it levels the playing field for all the competitors to say, I will meet NASA’s need, but I have to have extra capacity on there, whether I can sell it or not. It’s a different thing, but that stimulates the market in a way that says there really is regular capacity. So I think some of that interaction where CLPS is helping set us up is an investment, not necessarily a technology, but some structuring. And I know, I know the CLPS program is working on CLPS 2.0 and we’re coming up on where we’re going forward. So some of those ideas where maybe you’re not paying for that additional capacity, but we’re on the hook to be able to say that we have it, and now it’s on us to go fill it. I think that would be a very healthy ad going forward. I don’t know, Tyler, if you had something,

Tyler Mundt – no, I think that’s a great point. I think, yeah, raising the bar in terms of lift capability is always one to because to get to that point of building out infrastructure, we have to exceed that 100 kg Marc that we’re kind of sitting around right now. I think the other aspect is a lot of these initial development missions are somewhat limited to a single lunar day, and we’re going to have to cross that threshold of surviving the night and then eventually get into a point of operating within the lunar night to really capitalize on all of the expense of actually getting to that at that point on a lunar surface. And right now, there’s various solutions that can try and tackle that from a thermal perspective, it is quite challenging on a lunar surface. And you know, traditional battery powered can be quite mass intensive, but some of the more are two Rhu type concepts that have a little bit more of the regulatory burden is making it a little bit tougher barrier to entry. And so if we can try and ramp that up a little bit more, I think we’ll make surviving the night and operating in the night more accessible for all of our customers,

Tim Crain – and a little peek behind the scenes for the audience who doesn’t get to see this in the evolution of CLPS. You know, in the early task orders, it was very hands off. It was very we’ll meet our milestones, we’ll see you on the moon, and NASA was making sure we did what we said we were going to do, but weren’t heavily involved. We have evolved to a point now where there’s a lot more engagement on support. So right after im two we sat down with with CLPS and with the Science Mission Directorate, and we said, hey, we’ve got a challenge here. You’ve got this deep bench of Mission Assurance and systems experts that we can’t afford to keep on staff. Can you help us get over this one hurdle that we’re seeming to struggle with, and that evolution has been CLPS and said, Yeah, because we want you to be successful, not going to give you a competitive edge. But NASA is there for American companies to be able to reach into and say, hey, help us out in this, in this, you know, set of areas, and that’s going on behind the scenes, not just with us, but with with other CLPS companies, too.

Audience Question – Hi, I have kind of a combination of a suggestion and a question. So I think there have been some really good models with NASA, where not only have we been able to do science payloads in the way that clip SAT. Does, but we’ve also been able to do technology demonstrations. So there’s been successes in the CubeSat program, in the small sat world and so forth, where those pathways were kind of created, where things from SBIRs and so forth to get there, to URL nine, you could reserve slots for that. And so my question is, is, kind of, what is the reactions? And maybe you do want to pull a chair up there, because you could help answer it, too. But you know, what are the reactions to? Maybe trying to add those gateways, you’re kind of getting those through the commercial angle, but I think there’s also ways you could leverage the programs within NASA to get that way too?

Tim Crain – It’s a great question, and maybe part of the problem is just marketing and getting the story out, because a lot of what you’re suggesting is happening today. The PRISM program within NASA, basically is incubating the science payloads and giving opportunity to say you got ideas you want to propose science. We’re going to reserve a spot for you. So I don’t know, Regina, it’s like 30 prison payloads going in the next four years, something like that. The technology, whether it’s tipping point, there’s some others like that. But when you look at some of the codes for these CLPS missions, now you’ll see CS, Charlie Sierra, that’s a clip science mission. You’ll see, CP, that’s CLPS prism mission. But you’re also going to see, and there’s a proposal on the street right now for a CT, Charlie tango. It is a technology mission. And so they’re starting to get a cadence of mixing science and technology. And there are some programs feeding in the back. I think the science programs are maybe a little bit more mature than the technology programs that feed directly in. But some of what you’re saying is happening, and maybe we don’t talk about it as frequently as we should, but it’s a great idea. I agree.

David Ariosto – All right, I think that’s that’s all the time we have, right. So thanks everyone for showing it, for this mission to market the evolution of CLPS. So great discussion. Thanks everybody.