Lockheed Seeking Commercial Orion Spaceflights.....

Hello everyone. Welcome to Tomorrow. The International Astronomical Congress 2025 has now concluded on Friday, October 3rd. And I got to say, I'm a little disappointed. There wasn't a whole lot of big announcements this year. The things that caught my attention, we talked about a few of them last video. We had the mini starship announcement, just a study to design a mini starship without actually building one. We had a cool announcement from the European Space Agency and JAXA to launch their asteroid studying spacecraft together. A lot of smaller announcements from who I would consider to be subcontractors for various parts for satellites. There were several agreements between space agencies who don't really have a space program. And at this point, I'm kind of becoming allergic to the AI generated corporate speech about synergy and resilience and uh sustainability when neither entity actually is building or doing anything other than regulatory stuff. And yes, I'm talking about the UK Space Agency, which is no longer a space agency, but a small corner office in their department of science, which is very sad, making agreements with the Space Agency of Australia. Um, come on guys, not to discourage or disparage, it just there wasn't very many big announcements. The only other thing that really caught my attention was Loheed Martin potentially studying the idea of flying the Orion capsule commercially. Loheed Martin announced a while ago in August that they are exploring commercial possibilities to potentially fly the Orion capsule not in low Earth orbit but to either lunar orbit or deep space exploration missions commercially. They believe that with all of the work that they have been doing on Orion that after Artemis 5, the cost of Orion will be 50% less. And if we ever get to Artemis 8, it'll be even cheaper than that. Up to 80% cheaper than what its cost is today. And if they can achieve that, great. Good luck, Loheed Martin. But um yeah, anyway, Loheed Martin is teaming up with a nonprofit organization called BioAstra, which is studying the potential of doing a commercial Orion flight with biomed experiments. And they are already working on a mission called Twin Astra. They actually have an interesting program where they just want to take stem cells from twins and fly those as a way of studying the effects of radiation and in a team up with Loheed Martin. That would be a way to study its effects not just in low Earth orbit or the Van Allen belts but beyond that. And by the way, former astronaut Bob Benin is basically a I don't want to say a lobbyist for Loheed Martin, but he is in charge of strategies and sales and basically the guy in charge of leading these commercialization efforts of Orion. Poor guy. His official title right now is vice president for exploration, product, and technology strategy at Loheed Martin space. And although this is just an idea, this is just a study, it's a nonprofit group that Loheed Martin is working with that although might not have a whole lot of funding right now, they do have a lot of people that are supporting it that you may have heard of before. All right, this is their founders right here. Here's a handful of advisers that they have. Ben Lamb and George Church are the ones who are behind bringing back the woolly mammoth from extinction. and Esther Dyson is a space enthusiast who has worked on all sorts of biomedical research. They have several other doctors and PhDs as well that are helping them come up with different projects and different biomedical experiments. One thing that would be interesting if this actually does come to pass, using the Orion for biomed experiments is really similar to the Bion spacecraft, the Russian spacecraft originally based off of the crude Vastto capsule. And if they were to do that, would that mean that it would be Bioion? Sorry for the horrible pun. Kind of like it though. Bioran sounds uh sounds pretty cool. But here's the thing. It's Loheed Martin and it's the Orion capsule. Unless they can really, really bring the price down and have it be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, not just the space launch system, I don't see how there's any way they're ever going to have a business case to offer Orion commercially. They'd have to come up with a new service module that isn't built by the Europeans and or have a way to bring the costs down of the European service module. And while it would be somewhat easy to build a interstage adapter to have it fit onto other types of rockets, that is another cost and not something that I personally have seen Loheed Martin space be willing to do in the past. Not unless the government's paying for it. So yeah, you can imagine my disappointment that this is kind of it when it comes to the big announcements at what's supposed to be the largest space conference of the year. And it still was. is there was over 6,000 attendants to this conference and lots of different programs that were showing off what they had accomplished over the past year or past couple of years. Big theme that I was seeing is mainly countries outside of the United States looking at ways that they can have their own independent capabilities or partnerships without the United States, without NASA. And while there's nothing wrong with that, I encourage all of the space agencies of the world to have their own independent capabilities and not be reliant on others for their entire space program. I don't know, didn't seem like the same spirit of cooperation as before, at least when it comes to people like the European Space Agency or JAXA towards NASA. There was no representatives from Ros Cosmos or Russia at all. But there was a really interesting discussion about China and them being more open in recent times with other satellite operators and other space agencies around the world. whenever there are collision risks between their spacecraft and other operator spacecraft. It seems like there's been a new development over the past year where China is doing the reaching out and not only reaching out to warn about potential collisions, but then recommending, hey, stay put, don't waste your fuel. We'll do the hazard avoidance maneuver and make sure that we don't collide with whatever your asset is. And that's really cool of China. Of course, they have a lot more satellites than they did just 10 years ago. So, there is a bit more of a need for this. There was this really interesting discussion about how maybe there needs to be some sort of international body that doesn't necessarily regulate these kind of things, but helps enable those types of conversations to happen between space agencies and satellite operators to avoid collisions and not have Kesler syndrome. and no one is in disagreement. The only thing that there is to disagree about as to how actually to go about it. I don't know. I think it's a good idea. I don't know who should be the people to run that. Should it be a volunteer service? Should it be something within the United Nations? The United Nations does have kind of sort of a space agency type thing, UNUSA, but they don't actually do anything. I don't think I I don't feel like the UN is the organization to just help facilitate communications between satellite operators and spacecraft operators. This is something I would like to have a conversation with the rest of the Tomorrow crew about. But in the meantime, what are your thoughts? Who do you think should be the organization or body to take on such a thing? because I do think that we all agree that that's a good idea and that everyone should be in communication with each other or at least have a line of communication to warn each other whenever their stuff might crash into each other. It's a good idea, but how do you think we should go about it? That's what I would like to know. Also, let me know what you think about this Loheed Martin concept. Do you think that there is any realistic path for them to have a commercial option for Orion or is it going to be retired after the Artemis missions using it are finished? I don't know. In any case, thank you very much for watching this video. My name is Space Mike and until the next time I see you guys, keep moving onwards and upwards. And don't forget, Pasper at Astra through difficulty to the stars.