At Via Satellite’s Satellite 2022 conference on Monday, March 21st, Dennis Stone, Project Executive for the US$400M Commercial Destinations Free Flyer project in NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Development Program (CLDP), delivered a keynote address on the growing LEO economy and NASA’s expected role within it.
Stone emphasized that the LEO-based ISS has been a great boon for science. He said that “microgravity is such an amazing tool in biology…even down to the cellular level,” and has helped other physical sciences as well. He also said that LEO-based manufacturing is already showing serious potential in the creation of new drugs and therapeutics, as well as more exotic medical manufactures like heart valves and corneas—not to mention producing other materials (like fibre optics) that are “purer” due to the microgravity environment.
(For more on biomedical manufacturing in microgravity, click here to read SpaceQ’s coverage of the recipients of NASA’s Demand Stimulation Awards.)
The infrastructure in LEO will also be critical when humans go to the Moon and Mars, and the ISS is already being used to help perform the research needed to prepare people for the trip.
But, soon enough, the ISS is going to be decommissioned. Stone said that “these benefits of Low Earth Orbit are not going to go away…but the station is going to go away.” So what have they been doing to get ready for the planned 2030 end of the ISS?
The most important shift in policy is a “seamless transition” from the “current regime” where NASA is the owner and operator to one where NASA is “one of many customers” for companies building and maintaining infrastructure in LEO. That’s why they created the CLDP to consolidate their LEO commercialization initiatives and guide their investments into LEO supply and demand, creating “robust and vibrant” enterprises.
He then showed the wide variety of capacities of private enterprises that they see working in LEO: everything from launch companies, to in-space manufacturing, to research and science at a LEO National Lab. It will be “diverse,” serving markets that go “well beyond NASA.”
On the ISS in particular, they’re using a two-phase structure similar to the existing Commercial Resupply Services and Commercial Crew programs. Phase 1, currently ongoing, is where they award initial investments to companies that are in the process of creating commercial destinations in LEO, though Stone said that they were only considering operators with significant private investment as well.
Phase 2, meanwhile, will involve open competition to provide these services to NASA among all the operators in the sector, including (but not limited to) the companies they invested in. Phase 2 will begin no sooner than FY 2026.
Stone explored the four main companies currently involved in Phase 1 funding. The first, Axiom Space, is building their commercial destination as an attachment to the existing International Space Station, with an eye to taking their component and splitting it off when the ISS is decommissioned. The three other station initiatives he said that NASA has invested in include Houston-based Nanoracks working with Lockheed-Martin and Voyager space on their “Starlab”; Northrup-Grumman’s station which uses familiar technology and what Stone called “heritage components;” and Blue Origin and Sierra Space’s “Orbital Reef.”
Both the Blue Origin and Nanoracks stations use inflatable components to increase their size, and all three are built to be expanded with more modules as both private-sector and governmental demand grows.
He closed by reemphasizing that this is NASA pivoting from “operator to customer” in LEO, as NASA sets its sights further afield to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond.