transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:11] Hello, and welcome to Main Engine Cut Off. I am Anthony Colangelo, and I've got a guest with me today, Ghonhee Lee, the founder and CEO of Katalyst, who is coming up on a launch to go up and reboost the Swift Observatory for NASA. A really exciting mission that sort of came out of nowhere. A very quick timeline to get this thing up and launched after the Swift Observatory was going to be de-orbiting sooner than expected. The NASA team's been managing the spacecraft the last couple of weeks to extend its life as long as possible to get this mission up. And right now, as we sit here, they're less than two months away, about two months away from launching the spacecraft to go up and boost Swift. So let's talk about, we want to talk about the company history, what they've been working on, this mission itself, where they're going from here. So without further ado, let's dive in to the conversation. Ghonhee, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's awesome to have you here.

Speaker 2:
[01:03] Anthony, thanks so much for inviting me. This is a great pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1:
[01:09] You've got some wild times coming up in the next few months. I want to talk about the mission that's about to launch, but I also need to talk about the origin story, because I feel like I've seen your name over the past several years, but it also kind of feels like you've come out of nowhere and all of a sudden are boosting a NASA telescope. And that's, if you look at the spacenews.com archives, there's not that many stories about Catalyst. So I would love to catch up on where did it start, and what has the path been to get to this point?

Speaker 2:
[01:40] I love that in our world, the SpaceNews archives is our time capsule of what's been going on.

Speaker 1:
[01:47] That's it, right?

Speaker 2:
[01:48] Definitely, definitely our reality. Yeah, just sneak preview. We are within 60 days of launching a robotic spacecraft to go out and catch a Planetary Science Observatory in low Earth orbit. I can't believe we are saying that right now, because six years ago when we started the company, this was all maybe just a pipe dream, that one day we would launch a servicing spacecraft, that we'd be able to dock with a Class A vehicle operated by the US government. But yet here we are. The founding story of Catalyst is pretty interesting. So my name is Ghonhee Lee. I'm the founder and CEO at Catalyst Space. We started this company back in May of 2020 with this idea that, hey, how come satellite servicing and robotics isn't more common? There's this big disconnect between some of the really ambitious missions that were being talked about. You'd open up SpaceNews every week and it seemed like there was a new space startup in 2019 and 2020. They're like, what's going on here? People are talking about asteroid mining. They're talking about lunar bases. But it seems really obvious that we would take some more pragmatic stepping stones between now and then. So how do we backtrack some of those missions and connect the dots to where the industry was at the time? And so for us, we realized there was this big chicken or egg thing going on, saying nobody wanted to go service spacecraft because nothing was designed to be serviced and it was really hard to pull these missions off. So we called ourselves Katalyst to break through that chicken or egg cycle. We wanted to start with really pragmatic solutions for people who didn't care about robotic spacecraft. I had a great mentor of mine saying, hey, nobody cares about your space robot. They just want to keep doing their mission. So we're like, okay, how do we frame the utility of these types of vehicles, these types of missions for people who are doing communications missions or space observation missions? And here we are today. We've been building it out step at a time. We brought more and more capabilities in house. Eventually bringing the spacecraft bus in house, the robotics in house, as well as all of the applications. And we're flying one mission here this summer with NASA. We're going to go catch the Swift Space Observatory in June this year, boost it back up before it de-orbits so it can continue its science mission. And we're flying another mission to GEO next year. So our team is pretty fired up about both of these things.

Speaker 1:
[04:21] You had an acquisition in 2024. A company's name that I've read a ton of times and never said out loud. I said, Atomos? I don't know. What was the proper pronunciation there?

Speaker 2:
[04:30] Yeah, a lot of different names going on here in the space industry. Atomos, Atomos, right? I think it depends who you are.

Speaker 1:
[04:38] Got it. So talk to me about that. Was that the tech tree at that point for Katalyst? You were working more on the robotics in first, and that was where you went for some of that spacecraft bus expertise and brought the two things together. What was the structure at the time?

Speaker 2:
[04:55] Yeah, absolutely. Katalyst was positioned at the very end of the entire chain, the workflow. We were focused on building products for space domain awareness, sensors, things like that. And we were partnering with other OTV companies, other servicing companies to deliver these payloads on orbit. But what we found was it was really challenging to be able to go quickly when you had to manage this huge partner network. And so we were working with this other company as a potential supplier of OTV capabilities. And we're like, hey, we really like this team. They have really great technology. They had built their own satellite bus in-house, which is pretty unique. They had flown it on orbit in 2024. And after a little while working together, it just makes sense to combine this. We're like, if we could take the infrastructure technology that they have and kind of all the access to government contracts and things like that on our side and put them together, we could make a super company. And so we decided to do that. We closed the acquisition about a year ago in March of 2025. And I had never done an acquisition before. I'm an engineer by training. I worked on like guidance, navigation and control algorithms. And so this was very much the case where you're kind of Googling, how do you do an acquisition? Right? And, you know, six weeks later, we were able to bring it together, which was phenomenal. And the thesis was that by combining these different parts, we'd be able to go out and just like do big missions that neither one of us were capable by ourselves. And I think that proved to be true less than, less than six months later, we were put on contract by NASA to go to this servicing mission, which is just kind of insane in nature. They gave us nine months from contract award to launch, to design, build, and ultimately launch a robotic spacecraft, which this is the type of stuff that nerds go to engineering school for because they're like, how do we pull this off? And it's just been incredible to see that journey.

Speaker 1:
[06:55] All right. Let's dive into that part too, because that's the aspect where it's like this came out of nowhere. What was the origins of that? Was that something that the NASA team was putting out there that like, we're in the situation with Swift, that we need to come up with some idea, and you guys had the right technology to apply to it. What was the start of that and the flow to actually becoming the person that's on contract for that?

Speaker 2:
[07:17] Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I think that for industry insiders, many of us saw some of this coming in the tea leaves, but definitely it seems like it came out of nowhere. But I think that that kind of connects to the bigger picture. Before we talk specifically about this mission, there is this general perception that the US is somehow behind in space, whether it's lunar development or on-orbit servicing or any of these different mission sets. I think for us, it's like, why is the perception that that's true and the US has SpaceX? How could these two things exist?

Speaker 1:
[07:53] Our superpower is the underdog mentality. That is our true superpower is that we always feel like we're behind and we need to work harder to catch up on things.

Speaker 2:
[08:02] Totally. I think that that's so true. Right. And I think that, okay, yes, like we are the world's leader in getting to space, right? We have space access there, but it's like, what do we do in space? So I think that that underdog mentality has been very pervasive, especially when it comes to things like on orbit servicing, or this idea of rendezvous proximity operations. And that's been like percolating in the minds of like government leaders, both at NASA, but in other parts of the government as well. So the Swift mission came about because two things happened at once. The astrophysics team that does the science mission associated with Swift, noticed that, hey, the altitude is degrading to a point where this thing might deorbit in the next like 12 months, which is pretty alarming, right? There had been like a lot of solar activity. There had been a lot of orbital decay, and they're like, oh no, we're going to have to start shutting these things down. And then on the other hand, the technology guys at NASA, STMD, were just like, hey, this is a great opportunity. We've been investing in some of these on orbit capabilities for quite some time, but have not really had the great use case to actually prove that it's useful for folks that don't care about servicing. And they think that the commercial industry is finally at the point to actually play a big part. So the NASA guys went out and said, okay, we have 12 months. Who can we partner with that has a spacecraft that's ready to fly, has the robotics, has the rendezvous proximity operations? And they did a really quick survey of the market and invited a few different companies to come out and basically pitch their designs. Like, how would you do this? What would you do about launch? How would you do the robotics piece? And I like to say that during this time, we were kind of just a little naive and say, like, yeah, we'll sign up for this. This is going to be great. That's kind of the beauty of like a startup, right, is, you know, kind of naive enough to just naive enough to think that you're capable of doing something like this, but advanced enough to maybe have a real shot. And I think that Venn diagram overlap was just right for us that the NASA guys were like, yeah, let's give these guys $30 million and see what happens. And six months later, I mean, I'm calling in from Washington, DC., our spacecraft is actually at NASA Goddard right now in the giant TVAC chamber. We're going through and firing the thrusters, moving the robot arms. And I was looking at this picture of it being unloaded from the truck. And I was like, oh my gosh, six months ago, this thing was a napkin drawing and now it's here. It's pretty incredible.

Speaker 1:
[10:39] I should have come down, man. That's not that far. I should have just, you know what? Let's pause this. I'll see you in about two hours and we'll come see the engines. That's awesome. But there's something about the positioning of that mission overall though that is such like the, I don't know, there's such a throwback. That's such an old spacey throwback kind of vibe, right? Like this is the situation in front of us. We need to be creative and we need to cut out what we can to get there faster because we are dealing with like an actual hard physical end to this opportunity. So has that been clarifying in the development process as well? Or has it just been stressful?

Speaker 2:
[11:20] No, it's, you know, this is like an Apollo 13 moment, right? Where there is a physics-based driver for both the timeline and providing the constraints of what is possible. And I think this is where engineers thrive, right? I think that over the last 50 years, NASA has sort of struggled with this existential crisis of like, what are we doing? We established this playbook 50 years ago. We're not able to deviate from it. And, you know, that makes sense for human spaceflight and things like that. We kind of have to do things a certain way. But overall, I think it's really limited the ability for space to kind of like get back to its core, like you said. And I think what's cool about this is building out a program like this means that you kind of have to change what you think about when it comes to modeling and simulation, verification, validation, like are you going to go and like stress test every little component? Or are you going to trade that for time where you know for a certain fact that like in 12 months, this thing's not going to be in space anymore, right? So it really changes the calculus. And I think that at every opportunity, I'm not going to say we've cut corners because our team's just been really sharp about making some of these decisions, working collaboratively side by side with NASA, but we've had to make this choice about what is the risk that we're going to accept and we're going to move forward and how are we going to actually come up with tests that allow us to have confidence that we're going to have a real shot when we get on orbit. This is, it's just like the right level of risk and possibility for engineers to be able to come up with solutions. I mean, just an example of this is we've had a lot of challenges pulling together some of the electrical systems on the spacecraft, you know, typically one of the most complex on any development. This spacecraft has three robot arms on it, right? Massive solar arrays to power the electric propulsion thrusters. And what we've been able to do by owning the entire system, we have the end-to-end control of the system, is sometimes we convert a problem from one domain into an operational problem, saying, yes, we can kind of adjust some of the duty cycles on orbit, or we can change the profile of the trajectory to be able to optimize for better charging, even if the efficiency of our systems, like kind of at the avionics level, aren't at the level that we'd like them to be. And I think that on a typical NASA program, you would never accept that kind of trade-off. You would say, hey, this is the requirement. We're going to design and pause the program until we hit that requirement, and we're going to keep going versus for us, basically, there's this like highest level requirement of like we have to get on orbit and we have to dock safely with the target and we have to push it back up. Right. So it's much more.

Speaker 1:
[14:08] Is the middle one even flexible? Like, is there a failure mode or like, I don't know, get out and push?

Speaker 2:
[14:12] Like, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, the funny thing is, is when this project was coming together early on, this, you know, we had a bunch of government guys come out and one of them had said, well, you know, like the alternative here is that this thing is going to like crash into the ocean. So, I mean, you know, this is going to be better than seawater, right? And so, like, that's kind of been a place of being.

Speaker 1:
[14:33] A little bar, yeah. Well, and is that, you know, you're talking about how these constraints make their way down into the team on your side, but have you had exposure on the NASA angle where the team that's authorizing this mission and managing it from the NASA perspective also has to manage up to make it clear to the organization that, no, this is a mission that, you know, we're, because of the forcing mechanisms behind this, this is a lost cause if we don't do this anyway, so these things are all right. Has that been a source of strife or has the whole organization been bought in on the NASA side that this is a mission that is going to be less constrained by constraints that you might normally put on something like this?

Speaker 2:
[15:13] Yeah, you know, I think the NASA team has been very creative. Like, they've been awesome to work with at every level. I think that it's pretty interesting. The facility that our spacecraft is in right now is in the same facility where they're working on the Roman Space Telescope. The actual TVAC chamber that we're in right now is the same TVAC chamber that the Swift Telescope was in during its AI and T phase. So it's very poetic to be in this facility. And we were just having this conversation yesterday with senior leaders at NASA. The target, NASA has invested $500 million in developing and operating the Swift Telescope. So it's very valuable. But if you were to try to take that same playbook and apply it to our mission, it would just never happen. Right. Our mission is $30 million and it's this totally go fast mindset. And so I think it's important for NASA to have different plays in their playbook. I think over the last 50 years, they've really stuck to their guns on a single playbook and tried to use that as like a blunt force instrument across the board. And they've been very leaning in to this innovative approach of, we're going to go and build out these things in a cooperative way with the company. But we're going to let start ups do what start ups do best.

Speaker 1:
[16:37] All right. You mentioned the money side. So I'm going to see what I can get out to you. $30 million contracts. You said you listened to the show for a while, so you might know my thoughts on air launch. I'm not the biggest air launch lover. So number one, let's talk about flying on Pegasus. I think this is the last Pegasus vehicle that even exists. Number two, I'm pretty sure it costs more than $30 million. So how's this working out?

Speaker 2:
[17:00] Yeah. The Pegasus is an interesting choice. I think it adds to the- it's just very consistent with the philosophy. Our mission patch of this entire mission has a cowboy riding a Pegasus with a lasso in his hand to go catch the Swift telescope. And I think that that just really brings all of the pieces together. It's like, what? These guys are going to go build a space robot to go dock with a Swift telescope and boost it up and they're launching on a Pegasus air launch? You know, it just adds to the dimensionality of it. I promise you there was a very practical reason for choosing the Pegasus. It wasn't just like, oh, it would be a cool story. For us, it's about availability of the launch. To try to contract a launch within nine months, because NASA actually gave us the responsibility of doing all of the spacecraft side but also contracting the launch. We hit up all of the major launch providers, and there was a couple of challenges. One was the timeline, two was the price, but more importantly, the target spacecraft was in a low inclination orbit. It's in 20.6 degrees inclination. A lot of the small to medium launchers that are trying to launch at a wall of silence and things like that aren't going to be ready by the timeline, or they didn't have sufficient payload capacity to this inclination. For us, Pegasus was a really good option because you're able to go down to wherever you needed to go, and we got a pretty fortunate situation where they had a Pegasus already built in a warehouse, ready to go, that was originally designed for another mission, but that mission had gotten canceled, and so now we had this at our disposal, and Northrop was willing to partner with us to make the economics work too. So it really came together all together.

Speaker 1:
[19:01] Pay them more than their rent for the space that they were keeping the last Pegasus, I guess was the...

Speaker 2:
[19:05] Yeah, I think that they wanted to get it off their hands.

Speaker 1:
[19:08] You guys offered more than the Smithsonian did, but they're like, we already got one hanging next to the space shuttle. So...

Speaker 2:
[19:14] That's right.

Speaker 1:
[19:17] Yeah, the inclination thing is interesting, because this is, you know, I'm sure... Well, also, we should talk maybe spacecraft size. I mean, if it fits on a Pegasus, then I'm pretty sure the Falcon 9 would have the capability to do that plane change. You know, they've taken stuff to even, I think, equatorial orbit out of Cape Canaveral. It costs a lot of performance for the vehicle. But if, you know, then you're buying the entire Falcon 9. So it does, you know, nobody else wants to ride with you to 20.6. You're pretty lonely down at 20 degrees.

Speaker 2:
[19:46] Yeah, I think that's right. I think the perception again that like, hey, launch is a solved problem. These rockets are flying all the time. Like that might be true if you're trying to go on like Transporter or Bandwagon or something like that, and you're willing to take advantage of the ride chair. And, you know, but for us, it's like, OK, if we launched in a ride chair, we didn't have control of our own fate. And it would take too long for ourselves to do inclination change. And so, yes, Falcon 9 dedicated out of the Cape, of course, could do the dog leg and get out to this orbit. But, I mean, you know, it just costs way too much, like, you know, minimum like $65 million for a Falcon 9.

Speaker 1:
[20:21] Doubling your budget.

Speaker 2:
[20:22] And then they double our budget. And so we're like, gee, what are we going to do?

Speaker 1:
[20:27] The reason I ask this, though, is that I don't necessarily, in this case, right, with this particular kind of mission and the position that you guys are in company history, this is the one where if you were like, no, we're looking at this like an investment and a demonstration of our capability, I'm not doing as rough of math on you guys going, well, they're spending $100 million to fly this mission, because if and when you pull it off, that is a huge accomplishment for the company and it sets the stage for everything that comes beyond that. Whereas when I look at CLPS missions, I'm like, well, the point of this is to be economically viable for these landers. So I judge that harsher in terms of like, I hope there's some profit margin in there, whereas this kind of mission, I see it more as a statement mission and a really awesome thing to contribute to, but it almost to me feels like it's setting up your future of the company more so than you're hoping to make good money on this particular mission.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] Yeah, that's right. I mean, our company, we were never motivated by trying to maximize profits on these missions, right? Like that's not why we exist. We're trying to bring this new way of doing things into existence. Like we're trying to will it into existence, that we believe that robotic servicing should be a thing, that it unlocks all of these other flexible architectures, whether it's for lunar exploration or for national security. It's just pretty obvious to us. And it's been really frustrating again that there's been other programs that have tried this, but they just never got the economics right. They never got the mission profiles right. So you're exactly right. It's a statement mission. Now, you know, we're not just like rolling in cash. And so we can't just like underwrite, you know, things because we think it would be cool. We were already planning on a demonstration mission that we were going to launch like internally funded, but it was going to be way smaller in scale. So you're right. The vehicle has to fit on a Pegasus. So this vehicle weighs around 400 kilograms. Our normal like flagship product that we're going to fly day in and day out is called Nexus. That spacecraft weighs around 800 kilograms fully loaded. So we basically sized it down. This is for a dedicated single customer, whereas our vehicle in the future would service multiple customers. But ultimately, it's all the same architectures, same robotics, same RPO sensors, same spacecraft avionics, all of those things. So we see it as if we can prove that this is possible on this timeline, then in the future, we're totally changing the game. Thirty million dollars, nine months. Right now, if we can do that in twelve months in the future, I think that would be a little bit more breathing room. But I think it's also great for NASA, and I think it's great for the industry at large to say, hey, these are the types of missions that we're willing to undertake now. Like, what does this mean for things like the Hubble Telescope or any of the other major planetary science observatories? Like, I think it's game on for everyone at that point to actually go out and do this.

Speaker 1:
[23:16] Yeah, you're cheating off of my outline that I definitely didn't send you, but it feels like you're cheating because the next thing I was going to ask was, sure seems like there's a guy running NASA right now who tried one time to do this to the Hubble, and here you are doing it to the Swift Telescope. So are those conversations that are more than, you know, you went out for lunch with somebody and they're like, oh, it'd be cool if this if we kept going and did another one of these. Or do you think that there could be a legitimate effort on that front coming in the near future?

Speaker 2:
[23:43] I think for sure that's where it's going, right? I mean, where Swift came out of, I think that there's like that quote of like, don't mistake like some of this like one time brilliance for like some grand strategies. Sometimes these things just happen. I think the Swift thing kind of just happened. It was like the right time, right mode, like, you know, right energy, right people and the right jobs. And like, like NASA took a big swing on making this happen. But I don't think it was in like their, their 10 year roadmap that they were like, oh yeah, 2026, we're going to have a robotic servicing mission for like a senior observatory. I think it was the right time. And I think that's going to happen with Hubble. I think that like if we've seen like the democratization of the technology, like what we've seen in the other areas for proliferated LEO and CubeSats and things like that, there's no reason why robotic servicing shouldn't be on that same trajectory where we would just inject it into all the different mission sets. And I think, again, from a space nerd perspective, like from the kind of poetic connection there, servicing Hubble with a robotic vehicle after all the human shuttle servicing missions would be just phenomenal. I think it's a great demonstration that like, yes, this era is here now. It's kind of like when SpaceX landed the rocket, we're like, wow, like that era is here now. I think that's going to be the case with Hubble.

Speaker 1:
[25:00] It's funny too, because if it's, I think Jared Isaacman's mentality, if he was anyone else in this world, he would have been like, man, I wanted to do it though. And in this case, I feel like he would be like, no, this is freaking awesome. It's a robotic mission going to do the thing that I was hoping would happen anyway. So it's the right moment for sure to pull this off and have the right person in charge that says, yeah, we should keep going on that. It's, yeah, I mean, you can't write better timing than that, to be honest.

Speaker 2:
[25:24] Yeah, that's right. And I think it's like the future connectivity coming. That's going to be a huge piece as well. You had talked about the difference between Jared being in his role at NASA versus when he was outside of NASA and some of the paradox of what's going on. I think that that's kind of similar, right? I mean, his leadership with what they're doing at NASA is pretty exciting. But I think that because of, it's kind of like we're just ripping the rug out from what NASA had been doing before across the board, that can be kind of like a force for a lot of change, some of it good, some of it bad. In this case, this is the type of thing that I think is just really important for the industry.

Speaker 1:
[26:07] All right. Let's dive into some of the more technical side here to round us out. You mentioned some of these other efforts that have happened in the industry, and I wanted to pick your brain about why you think these other efforts haven't taken off in the way that we might have expected, right? Because when the company was founded in 2020, I think a mission extension vehicle had flown at that point, but there hasn't been that many more. They've been talking up the mission robotic vehicle, haven't flown that yet. There was the DARPA program, RSGS. I think I visited the RESTORE-L program down there at Goddard. I forget when that was. I have to look it up. It might have been 2019. There was so much activity right around when the company was founded, but it hasn't flourished in the way that we might have predicted. Is everything a special case or do you think there was some overarching reason that it hasn't taken on as much as you would have hoped?

Speaker 2:
[27:00] I think that robotic servicing has not really been a technical problem for a long time. We've proven this going back to the Orbital Express Mission. We've proven this with even just what's been going on around the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle for decades and decades. We've had the technical capability, but I think that in order to justify this being a routine occurrence, it's like you got to make the economics work and you got to make the use case work where it's actually really valuable. And I think that we've had too many science experiments. We've had these science experiments after science experiment where it's like, hey, this is a $500 million science experiment to take this robot arm up, or this is a $500 million science experiment to do docking. And I think that the commercial Satcom industry, a lot of people have looked at life extension as a potential market for robotic servicing. And yes, that's definitely there. But if you're just focused on that, it's really hard to make a business case work because it's just like, A, those companies, they're kind of struggling. Right? And so they're looking for cheaper and faster solutions. And B, it's just there's not that many of those satellites to sustain this broad market. So when you can start bringing together the right recipes of like, how do I connect that stuff with satellites that are going to go service, like commercial birds, like you talked about the MEV, how do I connect that with what's happening in national security space, as well as what NASA is interested in with either building infrastructure on orbit? And if you can string together a playbook where one vehicle or maybe a few dozen vehicles are just kind of zipping around doing all of these things kind of like as a day in the life, then like the economics actually just like fall below that curve where it's actually feasible. And I think the cost side of it is really important as well. We have to have like basically done a bottom up work of we're going to take kind of modern spacecraft development technique using like industrial or automotive grade components, no small sat components, and just building in a lot of redundancy at the system level to pull these missions off. That actually I think the combination of those two things is what's allowing this to happen.

Speaker 1:
[29:09] So how does the technical outlook work out here for this spacecraft? Also, what am I calling this particular spacecraft that's going up? Does it have a name of its own?

Speaker 2:
[29:17] Yeah, that's right. So the spacecraft is called Link. Because our flagship is called Nexus. Link is like one step on the Nexus. But I think some people have kind of taken on the Zelda connotation as well, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 1:
[29:31] I mean, it's definitely the thing that comes to my head. So yeah. All right. So talk to me about the actual technical bits there of attachment mechanism to Swift, any other considerations that when you do attach, you're providing a thrust vector. So is there some sort of orientation aspect to it once it is attached as well?

Speaker 2:
[29:53] Yeah, absolutely. So the spacecraft I said is 400 kilograms. That's fully loaded with propulsion and everything set to go. We have three robot arms on board. And if I can just paint a picture for you, these are not the types of robot arms that you would see in a car factory. These aren't the big ones with like the shoulder joint and the elbow joint and the wrist joint. These are much more like a truss. They're super lightweight. Imagine a triangle that you can independently articulate any of the legs of the triangle. That's what our robot arm looks like. And at the tip of that triangle, at the vertex, we have a mechanical gripper that has three degrees of freedom that can grasp onto surface. We traditionally designed these grippers to grab onto the launch adapter ring of a target satellite. A GeoSatcom bird is what we were envisioning. But it turns out the Swift Telescope doesn't actually have a launch adapter ring. It just has some different structural flanges that we saw in the engineering designs. I'm like, hey, these look sturdy. And we're actually grasping on the back end of the bus structure on three different locations with this gripper. We have a couple of different backup locations as well. But what's tricky about this is there's basically no pictures, close out pictures of the Swift Telescope of the back end of the spacecraft. Everyone took pictures of the instrument and it fully assembled, but no one really looked at the back end of it where we're actually grabbing on. So we're actually gonna have to do some real time.

Speaker 1:
[31:24] Did you tell that to the Roman team that are just like, you're missing your boat, man. And you might want to stop and go take some photos real quick.

Speaker 2:
[31:32] Put some stickers on, some fiducials for us to be able to zero in. So we've had to solve this computer vision problem just as much as we've had to solve some of the robotics things. And so we're actually going to do a couple of different inspections and flybys and things like that to get a real good characterization on what this thing actually looks like. We don't exactly know where the MLI is going to be versus where the metal is going to be. So we're going to inspect some of that. And then once we have a good picture, we'll be able to grasp on with all three of those robot arms like I was talking about. And when we do that, it forms a very rigid pyramid, kind of three points of contact, statically determined system. And from there, our electric propulsion thrusters are on gimbals. So we have two degrees of freedom of gimbal control on each of those thrusters. So we'll be able to do the mass property alignment like you talked about. We'll be responsible for controlling the entire stack. And so it's kind of just playing dead. The target's going to be doing an inertial hold, that's going to zero out the gains, and just kind of play dead so we can grab onto it. And then we'll be able to fly the vehicle from there.

Speaker 1:
[32:41] All right, so the... There's so many directions I want to go with this. You know, this is also different in that, you're saying it's playing dead when you're actually working with it, but it is... They have a stable spacecraft, whereas in the future you might have a spacecraft that are spinning, or some other sort of motion that you can't correct for. So is there anything with this mission that would feed into non-cooperative dockings in the future, or is this kind of like, no, we're just really focused in on the particular structure of Swift, and we're to get through that and then figure out what we do from there?

Speaker 2:
[33:18] Yeah, I think that this is very repeatable. You know, you're talking about potentially de-orbiting derelict satellites, you know, they might have a rate of tumble about one, maybe two axes, that becomes a pretty hard problem. We think that the hardware configuration of this spacecraft is like totally good to go for tumbling objects. We think that that's always just going to be algorithmic updates that we'll have to do because we basically have two modes of our propulsion on board. We have the primary EP thrusters that give us really high efficiency, but these are like basically like one Newton, you know, all said and done, not very powerful, but we have the ability to do more impulsive RCS thrusters that are much more like low efficiency, high impulse. Using that spec in this case gives us the ability to have nice controlled approaches and observations because we have a cooperative target. But in the future, like you mentioned, if we have like an upper stage or some Leo satellite that needs to be deorbited, we plan to use the same grippers, the same spacecraft architecture to do that. We actually have a couple of different government partners that we're working with that are very interested in that approach. I think that's important because you don't want to purpose design one spacecraft for one mission set. That's where we've gotten into trouble as an industry before. You want one spacecraft. Ideally, you want one spacecraft design that works across many different applications. But what's even better than that is not only one design, but one instantiation of that can go and do many different operations. That's when you start to get the kind of, it's kind of like the reusability aspect of launch vehicles and flight to this mission set.

Speaker 1:
[34:56] So what is that forward roadmap after, this is more of a traditional life extension, deorbit, maneuver kind of situation or orbital reboost. But beyond that, you talked about how in the past, the company was working on pieces of hardware that would actually be attached to spacecraft. Is that still on the future roadmap or has that changed as you've gotten more physical hardware in your life and less computer?

Speaker 2:
[35:16] No, it's really coalesced together. I think this is like a galvanizing moment for us. Our flagship product, Nexus, that's the next fully fledged space vehicle we're building. That has this big payload bay. We can carry 200 kilograms of modular payload. I want to take this moment to differentiate against an OTV. OTV is like, yeah, FedEx truck you to anywhere you need to go. For us, this is where we'll just carry these modules for ourselves. These are things like sensor pods that you can attach onto satellites after they're already in space, refueling, like jerrycans, interceptors for space control, space defense. Every time we launch, we can carry four to six of these modules. That means that we have the star link that goes inside of the Falcon 9 built in every time we go. I think that's going to create the reason to be on orbit. Yes, you use the high delta V and the maneuverability of the platform. You use the robotic arms to do life extension deorbits like you talked about. But you can also carry these payloads that extend the usability. I think what's really cool about these architectures is that in this case, we're launching into LEO. Our next mission, we're launching into GTO. We've already announced that. But I envision just using the delta V to do LEO to geo transits to be able to do servicing in LEO, to be able to do servicing in geo, and then go out to the moon, be able to do work around the moon, and then come back. You just have this persistent fleet that's just always zipping around. I think that's pretty... It's both cool from an architecture perspective, but it's also really valuable economically to have that fleet up there.

Speaker 1:
[36:56] How about your own spacecraft? You obviously are going to have a huge amount of delta V with electric propulsion on board, and the fact that you didn't launch with a lot of the payload that you're going to be working on, on boost missions or de-orbiting missions, so there is some overage there when you're just flying solo. But are you thinking about anything like refilling those really advanced spacecraft with something dumber, to use a course word, or is this like, no, at that point, this spacecraft will have served its purpose, will have made the money we need to on it, and also our tech head has gotten that much better in the time between when it launched and now, that we'll just de-orbited and go on to the next version.

Speaker 2:
[37:38] Yeah, again, like all our spacecraft are refuelable. They've got 10 kilometers per second of Delta V and five years life in geo. This first mission we're doing with NASA is a little smaller. It's got lower Delta V because it has to fit into the Pegasus. But again, it's just like we can constantly refuel these assets. We can constantly be replenishing them with new modules, new gear. I think that what we've done is we've cracked a nut on, how do you create a business model that actually works and leverages the technology for its benefit rather than trying to shoehorn the technology on existing business models. I think that what that allows us to do is put more and more and more of these on orbit. Each time they go up, we can carry refueling pods and, hey, refuel ourselves, refuel target satellites can extend the benefit of this. And the beauty of all of it is we get to own and operate the spacecraft. And so we get to control this fleet. And by nature of doing that, we're breaking that chicken or egg. So the fleet's already there. Now we can start talking about assembling large structures and platforms on orbit, whether the use cases for RF power beaming or some of these exploration stations and things like that. I think that robotic servicing is actually gonna be a key with that piece of that.

Speaker 1:
[38:56] All right, well, you have a spacecraft to get to. I don't want to keep you, but can you give us a brief on what we're expecting schedule-wise? So you mentioned June is still the target launch date. Do you have more specific date from that? And then how quickly do you approach SWIFT? Do you dock? What's the overall mission timeline?

Speaker 2:
[39:12] Yeah, absolutely. So again, NASA awarded this contract to us in September of 2025, and the target was like June 1, June 30 launch window. We're planning on going on the second half of that window, probably that last week of June. We're actually launching out of Kwajalein. So the way that this is going to work is we're going to integrate the space vehicle at Wallops Island in Virginia onto the Pegasus, install it onto the L-1011 platform. Then they're going to fly it out to Kwajalein. It's going to take like three days to fly it out to Kwajalein. It's going to land on the island. We're going to be able to do some final checkouts out on the island. Then we're going to get ready for range operations and launching out of Kwajalein. That'll probably happen that last week of June. Then once on orbit, we'll spend about three to four weeks doing the commissioning as well as the initial rendezvous to the Swift Space Vehicle. That'll put us within about 10,000 meters. Then we'll have about three to seven days to go from 10,000 meters in. Again, we're doing some of that kind of inspection and some of the checkouts of the target during this time, and then doing the hard capture operation takes less than a day for us. Pretty exciting, we have many different comms pathways, many different cameras and sensors on board, so we're hoping to get some pretty cool footage out of this operation as well. Once connected, we'll be able to burn continuously with our thrusters for four to six weeks to restore the altitude from around 320 kilometers, which is where we expect it to be by the time we get to it, up to ideally 500 kilometers plus, which will add maybe 10 years of science operations to the telescope.

Speaker 1:
[40:53] I was going to ask about that orbit that you're expecting, that there's been news over the last week or two, the NASA team reorienting the spacecraft to minimize drag in the intervening time so that they can extend the life. When the plane is going to take off to go launch this thing, how soon up to the launch of that plane do you have a final orbit determination pass or is it roughly in range enough that we're just focused on the particular orbital plane and inclination and the altitudes and stuff we'll figure out later?

Speaker 2:
[41:22] Yeah, it's a little bit of both. Obviously, we care. The NASA team has been doing an awesome job. They've been doing this hunker down mode where they point the spacecraft into the wind to basically make it a more advantageous drag profile. That's bought us one, two months of time. That's been really critical for us to be able to do additional testing, to be able to do additional iterations. We decided to take advantage of that extra time collectively with NASA. Originally, we were saying, hey, we'll launch on June 1 because we were worried about that target being too low. Below 300 kilometers in altitude, there's just too much drag. Our spacecraft with the mated stack has this huge cross-section. We don't have that high of a chance of success. We want to get to above 300 kilometers. I think that going on the launch date we're talking about that last week in June gets us there at 320 kilometers. Should be pretty perfect for what we're looking at. And then, yeah, we'll have updates regarding the TLEs and things like that from the Space Force up to like the day before launch.

Speaker 1:
[42:25] Awesome. Well, this is awesome. Really excited to watch this mission. Sounds like maybe you'll come back afterwards. We can talk about how it all went and what's coming up for you guys at that point. But good luck with everything. Thanks so much again for joining me.

Speaker 2:
[42:36] Yeah, Anthony, this is awesome. Thanks for having me on the show. You should definitely come out and take a look at the space craft before it goes to space.

Speaker 1:
[42:44] Yeah, let's talk about that. Kwajalein is too far, but I could probably find you somewhere in the US. Yeah, it would be a long ride. Unless they want to let me fly in the L-1011, I'll totally go fly on that. If Northrop hit me up.

Speaker 2:
[42:57] Yeah, you can press the button.

Speaker 1:
[43:00] I've wheeled that into existence. That would be awesome. Well, thanks again, Ghonhee.

Speaker 2:
[43:04] Cool, thank you.

Speaker 1:
[43:06] Thanks again to Ghonhee for coming on the show. Awesome conversation. Really excited to follow along with that mission. I think it will be one of the more interesting things to come up in the next couple of months. So let's keep our eyes on that and we'll have them back afterwards to see how everything went. But for now, thank you all so much for listening to Main Engine Cut Off. Thanks for your support as always, making this show possible. To say 100% listener-supported show. It has been that way for 10 years now. I thank you so much. What is that noise in my background? Oh, I got some fun toys. You'll see them in the background of Off Nominal. That's a loud one. But anyway, it's been this way for over 10 years now. We're into the 11th year of Main Engine Cut Off. And I could not do that without all of you supporting the show, including the 32 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Donald, Ryan, Joe Kim, Better Every Day Studios, Stealth Julian, David, Theo and Violet, Lee, Miles O'Brien, Will and Lars from Agile, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, The Ashtegators, Desi E, Frank, Steve, Russell, Matt, Joel, Kris, Natasha Tsakos, Pat, Jan, Warren, Fred, Eunice, Josh from Impulse, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support as always. And if you want to join the crew, head over to mainenginecutoff.com/support. Join up, you get access to MECO headlines, you get to support the show, you get more of me in your life if that's the kind of thing you like. And that's it for now. Thanks all. If you got questions, line me up at anthanatemanagercutoff.com. And otherwise, I'll talk to you soon.