The Uber of Space - Orbit 12.10

Hello, tomorrow, welcome to Orbit 12.10. I'm Jade Kim, this is Jared, and today we are going to interview Joel Sercell of Momentous Space, and we actually have an additional furry bonus guest by the name of Scout, whom will take your questions as well. So kicking this right off, Joel, thank you so much for joining us today. So diving right into it, can you tell us a little bit about what Momentous is and why Momentous is? Well, so what Momentous is, it's a Silicon Valley startup that's doing in-space transportation services. So if you think about like what SpaceX does, what SpaceX does is to space transportation services, basically launching customer satellites into space. The thing is that satellites don't always want to stay where the rockets put them. And we're really focusing on a market that the rockets aren't satisfying too well, because rockets have a tendency to go into very specific orbits, and the satellites need to get from the orbits that the rockets drop them in to where they need to go. So that's what we do. Very interesting. So would you say then it's kind of like the connecting flight for payloads then? Yes, yeah, so it's just like connecting flights. So the big rockets like the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, the BFR, and then later on the Blue Origin New Glenn will carry lots of spacecraft into what we call standard orbits. And it's a very cost-effective way to get into space, but once you get into space you've got to get to the specific orbit that you want to go to. The other way, and so there are hundreds of small sats that are launched into space every year on piggybacks, on big rockets to these standard orbits, and most of those small sats would like to go to other places. And so what we do is we carry them to those other orbits. Now there's also a whole bunch of small rockets coming online that will be able to take small sats to special orbits, but the small rockets are more expensive on a dollar per kilogram basis and they can't go very high. So our vehicles will actually ride into space with our payloads, our customer payload satellites and spacecraft, we'll ride into space with them connected to the rocket. When we get into space we'll disconnect from the rocket that carried us and we will take our payloads to their destination orbits. Very cool. Yeah, I mean that's an issue that you don't really think about every single day when it comes to, you know, launching different payloads. You think, oh you know, strap it onto a rocket, put it into where it needs to go and boom, voila. But it's interesting to think about that that's not always the vantage point or that's not always the ideal destination for these payloads. Yeah, you know, the issue is that historically what's happened in sort of the old space way is that the big aerospace companies would build satellites that had their own space propulsion systems on board. And space propulsion systems are traditionally very expensive and they use up a lot of mass. And it's much more cost effective for forward-leaning companies to work with us so they don't have to have their own propulsion system. They just attach to us using standard interfaces and it's much cheaper for them and we can carry multiple satellites on a single vehicle and they'll drop them off each in their own custom orbit. Sort of like a FedEx truck dropping off packages on its route. Yeah and I kind of want to ask because we have a really good question right out from Andy Law in our YouTube chat room asking whether you guys sort of look at yourselves as a space tug or a kick stage. Sort of like how do you view moving those around? Yeah, we're a space tug. Absolutely, we're not a kick stage. We're a space tug and you know so simple as that. And we're starting small so there's a really big unmet need and that unmet need is created by this new space revolution. You know in 2012 there were only about 50 smallsats launched into space in the whole you know on the whole planet. And last year it was about 300 smallsats and our market projections show that within the next five years or so it's going to be well over a thousand smallsats are going to be launched into space every year. And most of those satellites are riding as piggybacks on big launch vehicles and those big launch vehicles are mostly just satisfying the needs of their big customers. You know the big old satellite companies and governments. So there's a huge unmet market need and so what we're doing is we're starting small with space tugs that carry smallsats and microsats to their destinations. Then we've got a roadmap that gets big real fast because the way we see the space industry is we see it growing very quickly not only in the number of commercial satellites that are launched but also they're going to get bigger and bigger over time. But we're really you know we're really a vision-based company. We've got a short-term business model that makes a lot of money but we're really all about humanity's place in space and where we're going as a species. You know human beings are natural explorers. We settle new frontiers and the species needs this new frontier of space. You know there's close to eight billion dollar eight billion I'm sorry there's close to eight billion people on the planet right now. We're still the population is still growing exponentially and we see space as it's not just a new sort of business space. It's a new frontier for the species and the planet and we see industrial manufacturing moving into space. We see data processing data farms data centers moving into space. We see power production moving into space. So you know it'll grow from a few hundred billion dollars a year now to trillions of dollars over the next decade and a half or so and so what we are is we're an enabling sort of backbone service for that new industrial revolution. Yeah and we've got another question you know our chat room is just lighting up right now. They're all just getting really excited about this and Revel is asking what size payloads are we talking about and how much is the deployer in weight. So like what what kind of size spacecraft are you talking because small sats you know it could be anything from like little cube sats up to maybe a couple hundred kilograms something like that. Yeah so our first service is called Big Ride. It'll go into service early next year and it can handle payloads up to about 250 kilograms which can be collections of dozens of micro sats which are cube sat size space spacecraft or it can carry a single 250 kilogram small sat. Big Ride will be for operation mostly in low earth orbit carrying small sats micro sats cube sats to their destination orbits. But very quickly after that we go we start to grow rapidly. So Big Ride will evolve into Big Ride Extended late next year and Big Ride Extended will have a delta v capability of six kilometers per second. So delta v is how we we measure in space you know how fast how it's how fast you can go but in space that translates into what orbit you can get to. If you get into low earth orbit and then you've got a delta v capability of six kilometers per second that means you can go basically anywhere. Go anywhere in earth orbit. You can go to lunar orbit. You can go to near asteroids and you can go to trans Mars injection. So Big Ride Extended increases the payload capacity a little bit to about 300 kilograms. But then it it makes it so we can carry customers anywhere. Then after Big Ride Extended we're going to grow to larger and larger systems. And our first really big system is Arteride. It's designed for satellites up to a few thousand kilograms. And after that we go big with Berberide which is really big satellites you know up to 10,000 kilograms. So six kilometers per second of delta v that is yeah that's tremendous. That's a lot. How do you how do you how do you guys pull that off? Well so we have a proprietary propulsion technology. We talk about the fact that it's based on microwave electro thermal rockets which use microwave radiation the same kind of stuff that heats food in your microwave oven. And the microwaves are used to heat water vapor to super high temperatures significantly higher than the surface temperature of the sun. And at those temperatures the water vapor actually dissociates into oxygen hydrogen and different different chemicals of hydroxyls and that sort of thing. And we squirt that super high temperature gas and plasma out of the back end of the rocket to produce thrust. So it's microwave electro thermal thrust or like microwave electro thermal propulsion with water as the propellant is our basic rocket technology. And then we've got a whole bunch of secret sauce and how the spacecraft is is designed and how we do our missions that takes special advantage of water's amazing substance. It's in terms of its thermodynamics and its properties. And so we take advantage of that in really cool ways to really have a revolutionary capability with these vehicles. So I have to admit while I was doing some background research on this water plasma propulsion I couldn't help but think how just plain old sci-fi this sounded. Because so all I could think of is like okay wait so if I take a cup of water and I throw it in my microwave for like 20 minutes like am I going to get rocket fuel? I mean clearly not but like the technology it sounds so elegant and it sounds so like it's water it's it's one of the most abundant resources on this planet and you turned it into literal rocket fuel like that's just so amazing. Yeah so yeah so water is a super abundant material in the solar system and you know what what the planetary scientists have taught us in the last few decades is that everywhere we go in space we find water. You know after the Apollo program we thought that the moon was a barren desert without water and subsequently we found that there's water frozen into the craters in the lunar poles. And we also know that about somewhere between one in five and one in three near-earth asteroids is loaded with water. And there's thousands of near-earth asteroids that are actually easier to get to in terms of delta v than the moon. So there's lots of places in space where you can refuel with water and that's what gets that's part of what gets us excited about water. Another thing that gets us excited about water as a propellant is most rocket propellants are toxic dangerous flammable and require high pressure bottles like you know that that operate at pressure levels similar to a scuba tank and that's a safety issue. So because we can use ordinary water that's just stored at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure it really reduces the cost of our spacecraft and reduces a lot of safety issues that rocket propulsion systems normally have. Yeah and there you go chat room. Our chat room was asking can you do can you get it from asteroids to do it? So there you guys go. All those questions like those 20 questions that popped up all of a sudden yes you can. And one of the questions from our chat room too from lure was asking you know using water as a medium in your plasma engine have you encountered any corrosion problems with like degrading performance extended burn cycles and if there are problems how do you guys sort of work with those hurdles? Yeah so we heat the water so much that it actually dissociates into hydrogen and oxygen and at the temperatures that we're operating water is actually an oxidizer so it will erode many common metals at these temperatures so it's it's definitely important for us to use metals that are to use materials in our engines that can handle extremely high temperatures and are oxidation resistant and I'd love to tell you what those materials are but it's proprietary. Yeah as I imagine a lot of a lot of things with this would be it still sounds absolutely amazing that you guys are pulling this off and working on it so have you guys done like any well we're super excited about it you know as as the CTO of the company one of my jobs is to maintain our intellectual property portfolio and and we have a patent portfolio that we patented all the solutions to these technical problems and and you know prove the feasibility of these approaches and so in a few years as we evolve as a company we'll be able to talk about how all these all the secret sauce of power systems work. Very cool I look forward to hearing about your secret sauce because this this is like I mean just six like how much water are you using to get six kilometers per second of delta v? Well the Vigoride extended system uses significantly over 100 kilograms of water and the Vigoride system uses about 40 kilograms of water as the vehicles get bigger we carry more and more water so Arteride which will carry you know 2,000 kilogram class payloads will will carry you know on the order of a couple thousand kilograms of water and operate at very high power levels. And from our chat room Dutta is asking you know what kind of power requirements does this engine have and how do you supply that and also Kevin M from YouTube is asking the exact same thing as well how much power does that need? Yeah so the power demands of the system will grow over time as our systems grow. Our first mission is called El Camino Real and the flight hardware for that is completely finished and built and qualified and tested and that's a low power system that that uses let's just say power levels that are smaller than the power levels in a typical microwave oven and El Camino Real we'd hoped it would be in space already but the launch vehicle the rocket that we're that's carrying it into space has been delayed so it'll be launched in the May-June time frame and the purpose of El Camino Real will be to validate the technologies and approaches that we have and prove absolutely without a shadow of doubt that they work the same way in space that they do on the ground and it'll also flight validate most of the technologies for our Vigoride systems other than just the water propulsion system but also avionics software all that kind of good stuff. Vigoride will operate a little higher power level than El Camino Real and then our first multi-kilowatt system is Vigoride Extended and then as we go down the road map to higher and higher power systems we get pretty substantial power levels in the tens of kilowatts and later in the hundreds of kilowatts. Wow well that's pretty impressive and like really exciting and I can't help but wonder or I really want to ask so okay so you started Momentus and it's doing all these amazing things but can you talk a little bit about your journey to and before starting Momentus? You have a really interesting history and I was wondering if you could kind of touch on that just a little bit. My personal journey? Well I've been a space geek since I was about 12 years old and I got very excited about the future of humanity in space when I was a kid and I read a lot of science fiction but and also engineering books and I was really excited about a vision of humanity's spread through the solar system that was articulated by a guy named Professor Gerard O'Neill who's a great physicist at Princeton and he wrote a book called The High Frontier and started an organization called the Space Studies Institute and he basically proved the scientific and engineering principles that show that it actually makes more sense for human beings to live in space than on the surface of the planet. There's enough material in the asteroid belt to build beautiful earth-like worlds with a carrying capacity of about a thousand times the carrying capacity of the earth. So think in terms of a trillion people living in comfort and in environments of their choosing, ecological environments with trees and parks and lakes and streams and these worlds can be fabricated out of asteroid materials and as humanity grows in population they can spread throughout the solar system and the basic fundamental scientific feasibility of that as well as a lot of the economics of it and the engineering was actually worked out in the 70s and 80s by Gerard O'Neill. That got me really excited when I was a kid and caused me to go into the space business. But the thing is O'Neill assumed that it would be cheaper to get into space than it has been in the last 50 years because remember the space shuttle was supposed to be a low-cost way to get into space and it turns out it wasn't. So O'Neill's vision wasn't fulfilled on the schedule that he projected because he projected that because it didn't make sense without low-cost access to space. So what got exciting in the last several years is that it really does look like SpaceX and Blue Origin and some other companies are going to build commercial systems that really fulfill the original vision of the space shuttle for low-cost easily reusable vehicles that go into space. That's what's really exciting. Anyway so as a kid I got excited in space. I did my undergraduate degree in engineering physics so I'm really kind of a physicist. Then I went to work for JPL in the early 1980s and I immediately got involved in advanced space propulsion there. Over the time of my career at JPL I took over NASA's advanced propulsion research program so I led that up. Then I became the program manager at JPL for all the spacecraft technology at JPL. While I was working at JPL I did my PhD at Caltech in mechanical engineering and in applied plasma physics for space propulsion. That was cool and I enjoyed it but space was moving a little slow in those days. So in the early 00s I left JPL and went to work full-time as a researcher at Caltech and started my first company ICS Associates which was a consulting contract engineering company. I had a client at ICS Associates that asked me to review what SpaceX was doing and recommend whether that client should buy a rocket from SpaceX. So at that time I had a chance to really roll up my sleeves and work with the SpaceX team and see how their rockets were working. My recommendation to the client was yes you should buy their rockets and boy is this exciting because they're going to have low cost reusable rockets in just a matter of a few years. So in about 2011 I realized that space was going to get exciting the way Gerard O'Neill saw it and I thought that's awesome what's the most important thing I could be working on that would help humanity's future in space. So I started TransAstro which is a company that's developing the technology to mine rocket propellant and water from asteroids and this brilliant investor and physicist named Mikhail Kokorech who is a Russian expatriate living here in the United States co-invested with NASA in TransAstro because he saw the potential of asteroid mining to really create a fantastic new vision for humanity and an awesome opportunity that so that we could build factories and hotels and you know settlements in space. And Mike and I were working together on you know that's really cool and the technology that TransAstro is developing is really cool but what do we could do in the near term to help this happen you know as a venture that is highly investable by the investment community and can really help today's businesses grow and flourish faster. And that's where the idea of momentous came from and that's where the idea of of water plasma rockets came from. And and then he is just he sees how businesses can be formed and create new whole new business areas. And so he you know he went out and worked with the investment community raised initially $8.3 million in seed funding. I think our our total funding that the venture community has provided now is about $9 million. And we've staffed up to about a dozen full-time employees. Our total team is approaching 20 people. We're an American company developing the technology and creating the jobs here but we're we sell internationally. And things are taking off and it's fantastic. We have we have about $420 million of letters of intent from customers to buy our services over our road map. And we've publicly announced $6 million in confirmed committed sales of Vigoride and Vigoride Extended. And our first customer there is a European launch integration company called Exo Launch. And we will be announcing within the next week or two another confirmed sale of about $6 million which gets our which gets our total sales up to about $12 million so far. And then there'll be a bunch more that we'll be announcing the next few weeks and months. So we're we're going gangbusters. We've built our first flight hardware. We're going to have Vigoride ready early next year for commercial services. We will be flying in space this summer absolutely no question. When that Soyuz goes we'll be ready to go on it. And Vigoride Extended is going to open the solar system to small commercial activities and governments that want more cost-effective commercial partnerships. We're very excited about public private partnership with NASA. You know NASA has really seen the light. They've seen that this old school thing where you contract with big aerospace companies and everything takes decades and billions of dollars is not the way to go. And they're really partnering with industry in new ways and they deserve a huge amount of credit for that. You know SpaceX as a company wouldn't be where it was without the partnership with NASA. There are other companies that are partnering with NASA in very powerful ways. And so this is all good. And I got to tell you it's just so exciting and it's moving so fast I can't even believe it. Yeah and Scott Harrod on our YouTube chat actually is kind of asking something that I was wondering about which is talking about you know your power plant. Is it going to be able to operate very far from the sun? I mean could you do outer solar system space exploration? And I mean you guys your fuel is water so you don't have to worry about like keeping it cold for long periods of time or something like that like you would with like a like a regular cryogenic upper stage. So you guys are you is Momentous thinking about going even beyond Mars and maybe beyond the asteroid belt? We'll take our customers where they need to go. And our our services can launch spacecraft on interplanetary trajectories. You know after Vigoride extended we'll have the Delta V capability to launch spacecraft anywhere in the solar system. Our you know typically solar panels are highly effective out to maybe the orbit of Jupiter or so. After that you need to go nuclear. But for the transportation service where we get our customers on the trajectory that they need to be they need to be on we're good to go. Very cool. So we can we can we can help NASA send spacecraft anywhere. NASA, ESA, anyone else who wants to do deep space exploration we can send them on interplanetary trajectories absolutely. Guys I know there's a lot of talk at NASA late about maybe using small sats to sort of like swarms of small sats to start doing exploration and it sounds like you guys are going to have a leg up on the competition of being able to enable that. Yeah absolutely. The way that we work with micro sats you know spacecraft in the say 1 to 10 or 20 kilogram range is they we carry standard CubeSat and MicroSat dispensers and even our first system Vigoride will be able to carry dozens of CubeSat scale MicroSats and drop them off each in their own custom orbit and they'll be just dispensed like any CubeSat. And Vigoride will be able to do that you know so for example the Vigoride extended system will be able to carry multiple say 12 to 16 u MicroSats into low lunar orbit right from low earth orbit on the basis of a low-cost launch. So this is a revolutionary capability and there's all kinds of exciting science that you can do about the moon prospecting for water just from you know CubeSat scale MicroSats right there in low earth orbit. Vigoride extended will even be able to carry small landers into orbit around the moon and then the landers will be go be able to go down to the surface. And Arteride will be capable enough to carry big landers to orbit around the moon and together Arteride and Vigoride extended allow lunar sample returns in just a just a handful of years as a commercial service. So NASA will be able to contract with us to deliver payloads to the moon just like they would contract with FedEx. Nice and you know I was gonna say NASA's doing that sort of like lunar COTS program right now are you guys are you looking at sort of trying to get in on that? So we think the lunar COTS program is terrific and if we had some partnerships in there we wouldn't talk about it publicly right gotcha okay so got it clear as day. So I you know I echoing your sentiment from earlier in the interview I really love and respect that this kind of all stemmed from a passion for kind of like democratizing space and the way of the future like you said it truly is it's a public private partnership and it's truly a global collaboration. So given that with all of the amazing capabilities that your company is going to be providing what are some of the things you're really excited about on the immediate horizon and a little bit more distant into the future in terms of not only like research capabilities but for the company for Momentus overall? Well I mean we're excited about everything that Momentus is doing. Momentus is a transportation services company so I really like the way Jeff Bezos talks about this. So Jeff has pointed out that college students working from their dorm room can start software companies that you know become unicorns and become billion dollar companies right now and that's been the capability for a long time but it's really expensive to start it's really expensive to start a multi-billion dollar company in the space business right now and part of that is because it's so expensive to get into space in the first place and but once you get into space then you've got to go somewhere and so then and so it combined with low-cost reusable launch vehicles our in-space services are part of the infrastructure sort of like the internet for space that will make it so that'll be inexpensive so that you can you know you can start building microsats and cubesats basically like a garage application the way Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple you know sort of at that scale and build a company that can scale to be a you know multi-billion dollar company so that kids can do that. So the key what's what's most exciting about this is that we're making space affordable for the little guy and we're making it so the little guy can build a company that scales and goes non-linear into space that's incredibly important and that's where the space frontier opens up and goes completely non-linear and as that happens then you'll see massive data services in space, you'll see power stations in space, you'll see space tourism, you'll see dozens and dozens of other types of businesses starting in space that will then launch humanity into space. So that this is a very this is I literally can't think of anything more exciting than this. We are very momentous is a very practical near-term company with a business plan that gets to you know large cash flow and profit early. We also have a very strong vision for the future and you know this is so much more important than a business but let me just put this in context. So the way that I like to put it is in the last five billion years on earth there have been four or five important events. The first event was you know a couple of billion years ago the first life emerged on earth. That was a you know that's beyond historical. I'm talking about events that are more important than history right. So life occurs that's a big deal and then you know a fraction of a billion years ago the first eukaryotic life you know like that has the type of cells that we have emerged. That's a big deal because now life could become complex and diversify okay. And then a few hundred million years ago the first animals walked on land and then we had that and then you know that's a big deal okay. And then a few million years ago the first really intelligent animals started to develop stone night you know stone tools and conquer fire and that was a big deal. So in terms of you know things that are far beyond historical importance we are at the frontier of something far bigger than anything that's happened in human history and that is in the history of life on earth one of the things that you observe is that life always moves forward becomes more complex more capable and it fills its ecological niche and then it leaps into the next ecological ecological niche. So now it's like the spores of earth are going to be carried by humanity into space and we will and we will be then life not just humanity but life from earth will be making the great leap into space and by making that great leap into space it gives a potential for the human population over the next thousand years to grow to a trillion people and humanity to spread throughout the solar system and at the end of that time we will have vehicles that will be capable of traveling between the stars and spreading throughout the universe. So what we can see is a vision of life from earth having unlimited potential immortal in its scope the ability to expand and learn in a dynamic way so that's that's this is beyond historically important. Now that vision is very important because what it tells every human being on the earth is that there are no limits to growth and that your children and their children can all have better and better lives with unlimited potential to develop their minds and explore intellectually emotionally culturally and that positive energy will energize people to do better in everything they do and create an even more positive spirit here so you know in a very deep sense Momentus is a country is a company that has a vision of humanity equipped with everything it needs to travel throughout the solar system to expand and grow. Our mission is to make that happen. So so there's nothing more exciting than this. End of statement. There's nothing more exciting than the space adventure that Momentus is part of. Goodness well you've certainly sold us that was captivating to say the least. So where can our audience go to find more information and more news about Momentus and all the amazing things it's going to be pursuing? So we have a nice website that people really that we get a lot of positive feedback on the website so I'd recommend that people go to www.momentus.space we're not dot com we're dot space and it and Momentus spelled the it's spelled like the word Momentus except the last three letters are T.U.S. so Momentus dot space and there you can see a video that shows the near-term vision for the company and you can read blogs about our company strategy our team and that sort of thing there's and soon we'll have a really cool tool that you'll be able to go to that website and you'll be able to it'll be like Expedia for in in space rides you'll be able to pick what orbit you want to go from what orbit you want to go to and oh there's our video playing that's cool so then we're also active on social media and LinkedIn and and Twitter and that sort of thing and so check it out well thank you very much well Joel thank you so much for joining us today and teaching us all about Momentus and this incredible technology water plasma propulsion I still can't believe I'm saying that out loud so I know we're all really excited to see the capabilities and to see all of the fantastic things getting launched into space and into new places new destinations but before we say goodbye officially I of course have a very lovely thank you I'd like to give to our Escape Velocity citizens these folks contribute $10 an episode on Patreon as well as our orbital citizens my favorite people as well as everyone else I'm going to be mentioning $5 an episode and suborbital yes names are getting smaller these folks uh dedicate $2.50 an episode and last but certainly not least is our ground support citizens I will sing so that you can try to find your name on that wall of text because all of these folks contribute a dollar to $2.49 per episode on Le Patreon if you would like to become a supporter of tomorrow please head on over to www.patreon.com tomorrow and contribute whatever you see fit and if you don't want to donate monetarily that's totally cool simply share the show with your friends and your family uh smash that subscribe button hit that thumbs down up shoot definitely don't hit the thumbs down unclick the thumbs down click the thumbs up share us with your friends subscribe send us snacks all the snacks but make sure they're not perishable and we will see you uh every Saturday for Tomorrow's Space and on that note thank you for tuning in and we hope you have a lovely rest of your week