The Best of NASA and Space Logistics

Blythe Brumleve

Jan 7, 2025

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Join us for a special compilation episode featuring the best of our 2024 NASA and space logistics coverage. We dive into three exciting topics: how NASA handles deep space supply chains, the science behind growing food in space, and an exciting conversation with Inversion Space about building orbital warehouses.

From autonomous docking to space-grown lettuce to delivering cargo anywhere on Earth within an hour, these stories highlight how the final frontier is becoming the next revolution in logistics. Whether you’re a space enthusiast or logistics professional, this roundup demonstrates how the industry is (literally) reaching for the stars.

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Podcasts Space Logistics

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Unknown: 0:00

Music. Welcome into a very special edition of everything is logistics, where we're highlighting some of your favorite space logistics episodes from 2024

Blythe Brumleve: 0:16

over the summer, I attended a NASA Launch where I got to go behind the scenes of a launch day down in Cape Canaveral, Florida. And this trip seriously changed my life. It felt like the culmination of my entire career wrapped up into one, and it just so happens to cover a variety of facets of my lifelong interests, as well as what's going on with developing the next level of logistics in space now, back in August, we released several episodes covering this entire trip, along with subsequent follow up episodes with some of the coolest startups working in space logistics. Think of this as a super space logistics episode all in one so you don't have to dig around for the good stuff. Now, if you don't know me, my name is Blythe, and our show covers topics for the thinkers and freight to help tell the stories of how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Now for this episode, we are featuring three of your most popular I love all of the NASA episodes that we've done and in all of the space episodes that we've done, but I pulled together the top three that you told me that you liked based on views and downloads. And so we are going to be featuring, just to kick things off, Deep Space logistics. So that's going to be the first episode you're going to hear. Next up, we are going to cover how to grow food in space. It turns out that's a very pivotal thing that you need to do if you want to colonize other planets and build humanity outside of Earth, you need to be able to grow food for them on a reliable basis. So that was a really interesting episode. And then finally, we're going to round it out with a company called inversion space. They are building warehouses in Earth's orbit to be able to deliver goods all across the globe in a little less than an hour. It's really incredible stuff that's going on in and around space, especially when it comes to logistics and building out that space infrastructure and what that looks like. Well, I'm going to link to all of the episodes that we've covered in this regard, in case you want to check those out, and all of these episodes experience the most plays in the space logistics category, which is also a category on the everything is logistics website. So in case you missed any of those episodes, or simply want to refresh, I got you covered. Each of these episodes will play after each other with a little whoosh sound effect to signify the start of the next episode. And I've also got timestamps in the show notes, in case you'd like to skip around. But with all that said, cheers to 2025 thanks for all the love and support. Thank you for helping make this podcast into something that I can do something like this. Go to NASA and attend a launch. This was seriously the the highlight of my career. So I appreciate all the love and support again. And I hope you all enjoy this best of Roundup. Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and freight. I am your host, Blythe Brumleve, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics. And speaking of logistics, we have another incredible episode for y'all today, and we are talking about Deep Space logistics. Now this conversation comes from a recent tour that I was given a behind the scenes tour, lucky me, over at NASA for one of their, their their social media programs, basically, PR, branding outreach, that sort of thing. Not that NASA needs any kind of branding or brand awareness, but they have a program called NASA Social, where they invite a small number of creators to come get a behind the scenes look at to as to what goes into a NASA launch. So this is one of several episodes that we recorded on site while on the two day tour over in Cape Canaveral Space Coast, which is about two hours south of my hometown, Jacksonville, Florida. And so for this particular episode, we are going to be hearing from Matt over at the Deep Space logistics program, and he's basically going to be talking at length just how we get things up into space? Are there trade lanes in space? You know, getting supplies to and from the challenges around that. How do you even prepare, you know, for a launch? What kind of supplies go on? You know, a rocket versus a transporter mission, which, you know, transporter mission is just, basically only sending goods, no astronauts, and so, you know, he gets into all of that. It's a really interesting discussion, and then he rounds out the discussion with a lot of Q and A. And of course, I had a bunch of questions, being the logistics nerd. So it was definitely one of the most enjoyable conversations and one of the most lengthy conversations.

Unknown: 5:00

Stations that I was able to record while on this tour, and I believe it's about 26 minutes long. So hopefully you will enjoy this episode, and I'll see you on the other side. Contract, I've issued the space logistics contract, or by an onboarding another spacecraft listed for a commercial launch environment, or commercial resupply environment for Deep Space, started with the moon and then working on our way on to near Earth, objects Mars, Venus, really just establishing a deep space supply chain. Up

Matt Wittal: 5:35

until this point, we've had other commercial endeavors here at Kennedy Space Center. So commercial resupply service, green national, SpaceX, Northrop, Hashem, CRS vehicle, their

Unknown: 5:47

vehicle. There's also the cargo dragon and SpaceX, along with others. We also have international Resupply Services from Jackson, which is the HTV vehicle, and the cargo resupply from Isa as well. And the name blew me, but there was a whole bunch of these things. So we established a resupply service in the ISS, which is above us, flying around at about 300 to 400 kilometers, about seven to nine kilometers a second, relative on the earth. I'm trying to go further. The Moon is much closer. Way in an over orbit. It's much more difficult to find the orbit that we're going to is very elliptical, very unusual. It provides a lot of challenges for us, a lot of things that we didn't have to face with ISS, first of which is a lag time. We have to have a lot of autonomy with the gateway that we did have with ISS because there's always people behind us. There's no communications delay. It's right above us, but we're dealing with something as far away as the moon, that two second delay crash a successful dock. So the vehicle is going to have to learn it again by itself, and this is provided with a massive change. Analogy to this would be, if you wanted to move around to for example, come down this road and then take a right turn and park by the couch, you know exactly where the cops are. You know how hard it is from start to finish, where it needs to turn, how hard needs to turn, and where it needs to get there. But imagine if you weren't exactly sure where that corner was right turn, but you weren't exactly sure where, so you have to have that robot have a sensor to measure where the couches are. It's not going to be a perfect measurement, and it's going to have to update that and update its estimate every time step. So imagine this, not just in one degree of freedom, but in six. And that's the challenges that we have to face. In addition to just gateway, in addition to this gateway. So as we have our logistics vehicle coming in close to the Gateway, it's about this big, so it's about one space of the size to so when it slows down, it's firing those jets. You ever see jets take off from the aircraft carrier, you have that big panel that comes out the jet blast deflector to make sure the proof is to get blasted off to get an aircraft carrier. That's the force that these jets are generating. So imagine coming out to a ship and you're blasting it with your jets. You need to slow down, but you're also pushing your ship away. So there's this coupled relationship between your ship and the space station, and so it's constantly pushing and pulling. So this is another challenge that we're trying to deal with. Trying to deal with. In addition to having these roll out solar arrays, here on ISS, these solar rays are fixed. They're made of silicon. They're rigid, and they can be buffeted, and they move and they wobble. But these solar arrays are roll out, there's a single stick in the middle, and they roll out, pulled out like a sheet, like a shade, right? And so these are going to wobble and flex all the more when you're blasting with these jets. So that's really what we're dealing with right now. And that's a lot of challenges that I deal with, in addition that I work a lot with lunar environments. So the lunar dust that you might know is very dangerous, where you raise the astronauts bring it in to get something called silicosis, which erodes the lungs. It's also very sharp and abrasive. So if you get that in any moving parts, grinds down those gears and makes them pretty much useless. So longest time we spent on lunar surface prior to the art which program was a total of about 73 hours during one of the Apollo programs. And by the time they came back for the 73 hours, everything was dirty, broken and falling apart. So it's amazing that no one died during the fall broken, at least in space. So some of that dust is eventually going to be cleaned to the outside of starship. We did some tests with various materials, especially untreated aluminum. We spun that up to 400 Gs, and the dust didn't move. So this dust fits onto aluminum wedges and cracks, and the G force is not enough to pull it away, so it's going to survive the launch environment and a lunar surface to Gateway, and we're worried that when it docks, it might transfer some of that dust, because the charge dynamics are more powerful than the gravitational field in orbit. Of course, the gravitational fields relatively so. I. So that's just some of the challenges. There's also thermal challenges, there's radiation challenges, there's optical challenges. If those services get covered by Lindsey dust, how are you going to dock? Are you going to have enough clearance to dock, because you're using optical sensors to dock, is it going to damage the docking mechanisms? Is the resupply service going to carry enough oxygen and nitrogen to resupply the habitat. The micrometeorite or orbital debris environment in North orbit, as you might know, is very dangerous, but in the moon, it might be less frequent, but they're traveling much faster. So where we might have stuff flying around at 11 kilometers per second in the north orbit, they're 20 to 100 kilometers per second out by the moon. So one of those punctures, you have to have stronger, more durable materials that can handle these very rare, very small, but very high speed punctures. And then south of the space station, there's no emergency return for the gateway. It varies with the ISS and the ISS. You can come back to the very surface, and it's as little as 90 minutes, but you're up if you have a catastrophe, you're stuck up there for at least three and a half days, but probably closer to a week, week and a half. So it's, it's a lot of moving pieces, it's a lot of ways that our astronauts can die, and we don't want them to. So questions, I guess, so I'm hearing you mentioned, like, a lot of challenges and problems. I was wondering how you kind of, like, go through these problems or discover them. Like, obviously, there's some of it that you guys have experienced before with the ISS, but this is a completely different kind of mission. What more problems are you expecting? And then how do those problems affect your kind of timeline for this development? Sometimes I wish our engineers understood that this is a completely different kind of system, because we have a lot of people coming in from ISS that are very experienced, very knowledgeable and very talented, but there's a tendency to try and pull over ISS methodology into a completely new system. And so that's usually where we identify these problems, is that we try to use old methodologies to solve new problems, and then we have some kind of disconnect, and we run some analyzes, and it's like, oh, look, this is terrible. For example, we did the first analysis of starship talking to the gateway, and it's spinning. It's just telling so we had to take a step back, like, okay, let's figure out how we're gonna fix this. So it's a lot of analysis. It is a ridiculous amount of meetings. However, meetings you imagine that we have to sit through to make ISS or gateway event probably double or triple that, because it's going on constantly. And usually the calendar has two or three meetings going on at the same time, and you can choose which one is closest to your expertise to sit in. So lots of talking, lots of I think it's a lot of a very candid work environment. So there's there's always egos going on, but I think NASA is a pretty good place where if someone says, This is wrong, and this is why people are more receptive to that, whereas I think if you do it at a company, it's all about dollars and cents, and so it's like, no, that's too expensive. Granted, that does have that NASA as well, but not just from a cargo perspective, I get, like, fuel and oxygen and things like that, but what are some other items that you're regularly shipping up to space? And then what are maybe some backup items? That's a very good question from the distance. So there, let's start with this. So there are two types of deliveries that we have in gateway. One is called a fast transit, which goes from the surface of the Earth to the gateway in about three and a half minimum days, usually about a week, to do all the fly bys and burns. And then we have a slow transit, which means we can build a remote cargo over a long period of time. And what we do is, we come from Earth, we have this big, big slingshot of the moon, because the Earth is orbiting the moon, so we use that momentum to fly in space. And then we slow down out by the sun, and when the moon has come back around the end, we can use its energy to slow us down and put us into the orbit that we need to go into. And so by doing that, we can tackle more car both. But you're also in space for 180 days in a pressurized tube being blasted by radiation. So you have to consider what you're transporting is the food in a radiation safe container, and how long can it last in orbit? Because if you're delivering food, it might be a problem. If you're not delivering food, you're delivering outfitting equipment for gateway payloads, for the power payloads, for the power payload racks for when you're delivering astronauts. Diapers. We're diapers on lunar surface because they're on EVA for eight hours of time, or uniforms or toothbrushes, then you might be alright floating around for over 80 days. So there's the standard consumables that you might expect, food, water, Norwich tanks, nitrogen, oxygen, resupply service tanks. And then there's, like I said, toothbrushes and consumables. There's other things that the astronauts have to work on on a regular basis. So there are parts that are designed to be replaced after a certain amount of time so they don't fail. So these are standard operating, standard maintenance stuff they have to do with Gateway, just so we do with ISS, what else the toilet we're delivering, the space toilet, and that goes up with every mission. Currently, this brand. What we think we're doing, still a movement we might have a perfectly not about later on, but that's about, like, female hygiene. Because I heard, like, the first woman that went into space, she was sent with, like, women will get this, yeah. I mean, it sounds like it was completely Ingrid, right? And in a way, it was, but it wasn't, I don't think it's painted quite the right way. I heard like 1000 so 100 is a little bit better. Yeah, I don't know what the number is, but we certainly did not know what female body space. Oh, interesting. Extra amount did not have enough, and that's the same case. I mean, you've got to think, when the Apollo astronauts came back from the moon, they were quarantined for two weeks because we were worried there would be space germs, and then they would contaminate all Earth, even though there's natural impact all the time. So there's always this extra step of risk averseness that we take to provide too much. They'd rather have it have too much or be too safe, rather than not enough. But I don't know who we're sending out. I think we have a better understanding. Imagine that's a lot of space that takes up. Good question. You might have already said this, and I just said, is only NASA operating gateway, or other space agencies taking part? Good question. So gateway is a multi international effort. So maxar, which is this? This this one here is the power propulsion element, and that's made by Max R, which is an American company. And then Northrop Grumman is manufacturing the habitation logistics outpost, which is their first habitat. After that, it gets more international. We have the esprit refueling module manufactured by the ESN. And then the international habitat manufactured by the ESA and JAXA. In addition, Jax is sending a resupply service called their HTV XG resupply cargo, just like the they're actually working with very closely. I'm going to Japan next week, as a matter of fact, to meet with Jax to talk about this. And then we have the recent new addition to our international partnership, which is the Mohammed bin Salman space port, which is the UAE participating and building the airlock module. So it is currently International. The elect was recently slated to go to Russia, but there's been a an issue, and so we've given to the UAE instead, we're always looking for more international partners to participate, especially with science payload and other research opportunities. Of course, the lunar base on a surface is still wide open for participants to collaborate with us and make that work. So it is. The whole thing is a fly laboratory with a few rooms to stay and sleep in. It say there's a dedicated laboratory, not necessarily everything is multi use. It's a lot smaller than ISS. The ISS is about the same size of the six bedroom house. This is about the size of a studio apartment house. It's about the six bedroom house on the inside. Yeah. So this is, this is the ISS here, right behind you. You can see humans relative to Gateway right there. They're crawling around on the airlock module, like literally right behind. So that'll give you the scale of what humans are to Gateway. And the inside of that volume is mostly filled with cargo. And we have this passageways, and they have a good closet, which is the logistics module, so there's some space to move around at the same but really there's not that much that being said. If you look at the room we're in right now, it might seem like a decent sized room, but when you remove gravity, you have all this stuff available above you. So small spaces tend to become a little bit bigger in space. The reason I ask is just curious as to I realize the purpose of Gateway is different than the purpose of the ISS, just wondering how much of it will be used for research, because, again, you're in an environment that we haven't done yet, like you're orbiting the move. So we're gonna have to retest a lot of the things that we found out through testing on the ISS, like, I was just curious about some of the instrumentation that might go in it. Is there some place I can look that up? I go to nasa.gov I haven't found anything like that. They there is, you can get vaccinated, yeah, well, I'm going to be back to you. There is a place that covers these scientific instruments. It's not easily found yet because, I think part of that is because there's still a little bit of uncertainty. There are a few experiments that are, we know are going up. One tests radiation over time. And there are several radiation sensors being placed inside gateway. There's also a materials testing that which will be outside. And there's a ton of sensors, I'm not a human factors. Thank you. Okay, great. Our so it's a lot of human factor stuff, where most the biggest priority is making sure our attorneys can be safe in a different environment. So that's the biggest priority. A lot of those things go into that. As a GNC engineer, I'm not intimately tied into that, but lots of that. Thank you. So. Was wondering about, you know, obviously you guys mentioned sending people back to the moon and experimenting in, you know, lunar orbit. I imagine you guys have many future missions planned and operations like, what's the kind of timeline look like for how this is going to be used over time? Is it going to last as long as ISS is a temporary kind of thing, until you get something better over there? So there's two approach to that. One is that we do have a notional timeline, and that's carries us off our to 15 years. And I think it's like Artemis 11 or something, and that's what's available out from the public, right? We have this timeline that lasts about 15 years. There's also possibility of extending that. The main purpose of Gateway is, it's a moon to Mars thing, right? So this is basically our Mars spacecraft, our interplanetary Mars spacecraft prototype. We're learning what works and what doesn't work. So the short answer is, it should last for teen years, but it's a big investment, and just like most of NASA project, it's reasonable to expect it's going to be extended at least a little bit. Do you know what the current schedule is when gateway is supposed to actually be up there? And do you think that that's realistic and it's actually going to happen at that time? Yeah, there's, there's a couple ones. I mean, there's the one that we currently have in the public and then there's the working model, which has that schedule slip to slip to the right, and that's just the nature of space exploration and technology development. So the one the public not quite it's optimistic, not super optimistic, but optimistic things are going to be moving around. And really that depends on the progress of things like starship, which is a huge unknown right now. That's our first human landing system. It's making tremendous progress. It's moving very quickly. But there's a difference between having a re entry system on Earth and having something that can land our astronauts on the moon. We've seen recently that we've had a lot of Landers. Think of Apollo, right? It was short, it was squat, it was wide, so it didn't really tip over. The past two landers that have gone to the moon have both tipped over because we're underestimating the challenges of keeping something upright in low gravity environment unknown surface features. So something like starship, which has a very flat bottom, needs a very flat surface. So that's just one example of something we're concerned about that we needed a few test demonstrations, not saying they can, of course, everything possible. It's just a matter of technological progress, how quickly they can test. They can test, how do we the FRA lets them test how quickly we hear the water so that when splashing down the ocean, it doesn't kill you. And how do you test a lunar landing? Like, how do you Is it real, awesome simulations, or are you building an environment that facilitates points of like, yes to all the above. We have high fidelity computer simulations that test the landings thanks to the low lunar Lunar Reconnaissance orbit, lrl Lunas, we have a very high fidelity map at the South Pole lunar surface, so we know what that environment looks like, and we have some test sites picked out. Now, no matter how high fidelity it is, there's still some uncertainty. There's boulders we didn't see, there's places in shadow, and there might be maybe some noise in the thruster that it doesn't trust exactly where it should, and it ends up a little bit off course. So we have to plan for those contingencies. And so it's a lot of simulation based. Now, once we get the simulations working, we do have some things like a gravity offloader. I'm not sure you guys have gone to swamp works, or if you're going there, but if you get a chance, it's great place to go. We have a big lunar dust bin and a gravity offloader that simulates lunar environments that doesn't have thrusters in it, right? It's just a big dust bin. So we don't want to fire rockets inside a closed room like that, but we can simulate the dynamics and the resistance that will be generated by a thruster. So there's a lot of different ways. We can test these things, and we do all other questions. What are some of your favorite like supply chain or logistics facts for deep space? You know, we went to a conference in 2019 it was the air cargo conference, and that was a they put us in India, which is the nicest place I've ever been on a government dime. So I tell you, it's not. Usually you're in a Holiday Inn or something like that. We're in the office. And it was, it was attached to the Country Music Hall of Fame, and all these guys in the logistics conference about air cargo and logistics, they were all rather well. One guy was giving away bottles of his own homemade Berwick brand. It was nuts. And so it was kind of interesting to be in touch with that crowd, because usually I work with the academic crowd, and so meeting with these people and getting their perspective on what logistics looks like for the closest analogy we have air cargo, moving things from one place to another, was kind of eye opening. And they were always they were at first kind of confused, why is NASA talking to us? But once we kind of said we want to do what you do, but in space, starting to make little bit sense. So I'm not sure if that's really qualifies as the most interesting logistics fact, we still don't know how to do logistics in space, because everything's moving, everything's changing. And you can't have a set route, right? You can't have a set subway line. There's always. Some ambiguity. So are there trade lanes in space? Like, are you establishing maybe trade lanes or trade routes in space? Yeah. So, I mean, everything is moving around, everything else, so a trade lane that might work Monday isn't going to work the other day. So take the Voyager One and two spacecraft. For example, when Voyager One and two spacecraft launched, there was this once in a century alignment of the planets, we just fly by after fly by, after fly by. And they just they figured this out, and they loaded up on rockets and launched as soon as possible. And so that alignment won't happen. It's about to happen in another 34 years. So we're thinking about doing it again. But when they launched, it was just this perfect alignment. So you can't have a supply chain that consistently goes to let's stop off at Jupiter and then stop off at Saturn. And stop off because there's just not enough fuel to do that right now. We need a new technology to enable that kind of delta V and so how many of you have seen the expanse? Yeah, if you haven't, you should watch it. It's excellent. So you can see that the big change in the advance was when they all of a sudden started this new drop that ended up killing the guy who made it. But it was just it was just it was so powerful, it could accelerate so quickly on so little fuel. I don't care. It's like an Indian I don't remember what it was, but it was completely gaging. We need something like that to have these supply chains, to have these regular service to and from Mars or to and from wherever. But until then, that regular service to and from Mars six every two years, two point something years, because that's when Mars and Perth have the right alignment for home and transfer. Is there anything you learned from the private sector of air cargo, that conference that you apply at NASA? There's, there's a lot of things about it's, it was a lot to do with cargo packing and how they manage different shape cargos and different iterations. So a lot of the stuff with ISS is pretty standardized. We've had it for 20 years. We resupply pretty regularly, so we know what we're doing with that. We have specialized software that fits the optimal configuration to get the most volume. Because we ended up at we ended up being volume limited before Mass limited. So if you deliver 10,000 pounds or something, we can only fit, like 8500 before we're just packing it in, right? So they have this software that optimally fits everything together. But if we want to do different cargo, if we want to take on one load off load, and put in another one, and do it pretty rapidly, it takes up a lot of astronaut time to fit this stuff into place. So we're learning a bit from the industry about how they do their loading and unloading and handling these changing loads in order to best accommodate a variety of customers. And so that's something we've taken back. And we had a bunch of crowdsourcing challenges where we reached out to universities and even high schools and said, What do you think we could do to best manage our cargo? And we have all kinds of really interesting ideas. We have a automatic cargo loading and unloading system with like cheese, wet shaped boxes. It was pretty cool, and that was by the University of Minnesota, Michigan, University of Michigan, and they did really cool job on that's just one of many So Michigan. Oh, sorry, sorry, did I still somebody's question first? What excites you the most about all of this. So I come from a background of academia, and so we've worked a lot in publishing papers and writing. Now it's a lot of math, right? And my advisor was very much an academic focusing on, you know, it doesn't matter if this could be applied today. It matters how revolution it is when revolutionary this would be an odd year just taking the Einstein approach of things right? But I'm really focused on getting this stuff because we're publishing so many papers in such a big academic big talented academic community we have in the United States and around the world. Making that into hardware is a huge challenge. So what excites me to best is when I take this theory and I said, let's try to do this, and everyone tells me how bad it is, or how many ways it won't work, because that's that's a whole list of challenges that just adds a bunch of nuance, many different layers of nuance. You know, the I might have a simulation that works great, but as soon as you start adding noise, it starts behaving unpredictable. So that's what excites me most, when I when I come across a practical, real world problem that people like, No, you can't solve, that it's like anyway, those kind of challenges, going back to the expense that you brought up in this super material that could just propel us into this Trade belt, or based on their experience and expertise. When are your predictions? It's nothing quite that exotic. Our next step is nuclear thermal propulsion, and it's not actually any technology. We've had this in some form or another in the past 3040, years. I. I forgot the name of the project, and it was canceled in the 80s or 90s, but it was a nuclear thermal propulsion device. And it's pretty much the next step we need in space so that can cut down our Mars transit time in half. It's probably what we really need to get off the ground. Unfortunately, we're working on that now. Our Mars transit vehicle should have a nuclear thermal forming device by when do you think? Ask Congress if we have a continuing budget. We get it done pretty quick. The biggest challenge to NASA is every four years our priorities change. We need to be insulated from that. And assuming NASA, the government, approved the massive budgets. When would that? How long the soonest rate if we, if we were back up to Apollo budget, which was 4% of GED, like there's 4.5% of GDP, or, sorry, point 5% of the budget, if we're back up to 4% we would already be on again, we have a base, and I think we'd be thinking about Mars. You said it was 4% of the GDP during Apollo, right? And now it's, it's 4% of the national budget, yeah, GDP 4% of national budget, and now it's half of the percent. So it's 1/8 of what it went during Apollo. So, so just kept getting lower and lower. The Launchpad, not necessarily lower and lower. It actually got cut after Apollo, and it got cut a couple times, and then it's pretty much stayed there. So it stated about point five or half a percent of the national budget for a long time. And during that with that very small percentage we've had ISS, we have SLS, which is not the best rocket in the world, if you compare it against the long starship, but with point 5% of GDP, 1/30 of what the DoD gets. We still manage to do that. We're still trying to So, and that's also why they've been putting so much into low earth orbit, commercial partners, right? Everybody that's buying it. It's precisely true. So if we, if we have a very talented commercial industry that can lower the price, which is what exactly they've been doing, and that enables us to go, all right, just pop it back in to list out a few takeaways that I thought were really interesting. One which is Matt, when he says, we still don't know how to do logistics in space. I thought that that was really interesting, that they are still learning how to do that entire process. Another one was obviously the air cargo conference that they attended back in 2019 where they were, you know, learning from the private sector on how to, you know, better pack. You know, their their own rockets, and you know transporters, and you know all of that good stuff. Another thing, if you were watching the video version of this conversation, that you might have noticed a gentleman in the background walking back and forth and fixing something. Well, that was actually a NASA engineer, and I he's walking back and forth as if he doesn't have better things to do, but he just notices a tiny detail that is messed up within his working space, and he has to fix it right away. So I just, I love that mindset, because there was only, there was like a small light that was out in the display case. And so he's he he is has to pause his day and make sure that that thing gets fixed so it represents his program that he works for, you know, the Deep Space logistics program that is represented properly, because do have to give him credit. The light that was shining was on the Deep Space logistics logo, which they have a really cool logo. Hold on, I will pull it up, all right? And another thing that I wanted to bring up, because I there's just, there's so much to digest from this trip that I just keep going back into my notes and finding new things that I want to share. And so this was one of the resources that they shared with us on the first day of the tour, actually, the first classroom session from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that is the data that they were providing, or the insight that they were providing, not data data to that they were providing in the first classroom session on day one of the two day tour. And obviously this is a deep space logistics episode, so let's talk about, you know, a little bit of the logistics of this satellite that is going up into space. I'm obviously going to get into more details for on that specific episode. So if you're interested in everything that goes on within launch day, make sure that you listen and watch that particular episode. But for this one, it's just a really cool, just like, photo gallery that the NOAA creates for all of their missions, and they go behind the scenes on everything. So it's really cool from a transportation perspective, of basically shipping this satellite over to Cape Canaveral and getting it ready for launch. So on this blog article, which I will share in the show notes, in case you want to. Download some of these images, because they have the download option right on their site. So they talk about the satellite itself and shipping it. You can see it here in this photo. It's Air Force us, Air Force plane that shipped it. And then it looks like, it looks like a Chevy Chevy truck that is pulling it out of the plane itself. And if I read a little bit of this about the shipment to the Kennedy Space Center, and it says, on January 22 of 2024 the goes you team carefully packed and shipped. Goes you from a Lockheed Martin facility in Littleton, Colorado, where it was built, integrated with its instruments and tested, to a facility in Florida where it arrived on january 23 and will undergo final preparation for launch. They say, shipping a satellite is no small feat. Goes you is the size of a small school bus and weighs over 6000 pounds, and after packing the goes you in a high tech shipping container that acts as a mobile clean room. A crew drove the satellite to Bucky Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado. It's okay get over the fact that we have a division of the military called the Space Force, which they actually kind of have a really cool logo. But the article goes on to say that they loaded into a C 5m Super Galaxy cargo transport, also crazy names space logistics really has, like the most fun, like branding Space Force, Super Galaxy, cargo transport. But the next stop was NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. So if we scroll through, and as I'm scrolling through on this web page, or web page. Jesus is it 1990 this website that is also linked in the show notes, they talk about that entire shipping process. Don't know that I'm going to go through it and read all of these. I feel like you know if you want to read it, you can go through and read it yourself. But as I come to the end, where they actually show the satellite that's inside of the launch vehicle, which is really cool to see because they're and as I'm scrolling through, you can see the launch vehicle being attached to the rockets, which is the Falcon Heavy with the double boosters. The Falcon Heavy is one of the rockets by SpaceX, and then it has the double boosters on the side that are infamous for detaching from the rocket and being able to land at the same time. Are not damn near close to the same time, but they take off with the rocket, and then they detach and they land on their own launch pads after the fact. So that is the satellite being attached to all of that before it actually takes off. So obviously they've gone back through and updated this website with, you know, website post with some of the images after the launch was successful. And so hopefully you enjoyed a little bit of that scroll through the transportation process, because it's quite funny to see one of these launch vehicles. Because on, I think it was the first day that we were at the NASA tour. This is just sort of, you know, a little bit of a sidebar. We were going from building to building and checking out, you know, just different parts of the tour. And on one of the stops, because we would literally just, you know, drive out of one building, and it would be a two minute drive to the next building, and we would park over and get out and do our thing on one of these pathways. And one of the times that we were doing this, there was another one of these vehicles for a starship, or not starship, it was for the Star League satellites, ilamas, Starlink satellites. There was a Star League launch the very next day. And so a rocket, or, you know, I guess, what are they call it just the launch vehicles that carries all of these Starlink satellites, which the goes you satellite is significantly bigger, like we just heard that it's in size of a small school bus that, you know the Starlink satellites are, are not as large as that. And so they said they there are a lot of them that are sent up in a Starlink transporter mission. And so that was blocking the roadway. And hold on. I will bring up that clip right now, and here's that video of that rocket actually causing a traffic jam for one of those routes that we were taking. And then one more last thing I definitely wanted to show everyone is we talked about the rocket boosters that both of them come down. And so for one of the creators that I follow over on Twitter or X, he actually posts a lot of these photos, and that the barges that ship, you know, different launch pads and. I guess it, it never really occurred to me until this trip of just how often, uh, rocket launches are actually taking place, you know. And as a Floridian, you maybe two or three times a year growing up, but over the last few years, it's like two or three a week now. So it's happening very frequently. There's also 22 total launch pads, I believe. And so for a lot of construction that goes on for launch pads, or as they're getting replaced, they have to ship those things in. And so it's really cool to be able to see some of these images. And that one of this, that this image comes from C Nunes images over on x, and this is one of the launch pads that are being shipped in and it's being constructed. There are a few other images here. We talked about the rocket boosters. You could see one of the rocket boosters right here. Like, isn't that incredible that this is essentially a barge that is built for the rocket boosters to come back and land on. Let me see if I can get rid of this. Then there are a couple just more images that I wanted to show for you know, we're tugboat respecters over here. So a tugboat pulling the barge with one of the boosters that are on it. This comes from Jerry pike over on x and I just think these are incredible images that these are the boosters that are landing, responsible for a rocket taking off, and then all of a sudden they're responsible for these boosters landing back on them. And you got the tugs pulling the barges going right back into the port of Canaveral right there. So just really, really cool stuff. And just, you know, for me, it's just, I think it brings it all home about how much logistics really goes into this entire process. We're still trying to figure out new ways and cool ways to do logistics here on earth, and to know that in space, they don't exactly have it all figured out yet. If you have some of the smartest minds in the world, in human history, really, that are trying to figure out these complex problems, and they're going to a variety of sources to try to get those answers. So it's just just really cool stuff all around. So I hope you enjoyed this deep space logistics episode. This is a reminder that we have several episodes in this series, I believe, five to start with. And then we'll start scheduling some interviews in the future with some of the meteorologists that we met, some of the forensic meteorologists that were on site, to talk about, you know, different weather patterns all across the United States, how that impacts the shipments of goods. And then we will also be talking about some of the other or talking to some of the experts, hopefully Matt included. We're trying to get them on, you know, a future show so we can ask him some more logistics focused questions. So all that to say, hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to check out the other ones and hit the link in the show notes in order to watch the video version of this or to see other videos as part of our space logistics series. So thank you guys again. Welcome into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am your host, Blythe Brumleve For we are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I've got another great episode for y'all today, and that is part of our space logistics series. And in this particular episode we are going to be talking about how to grow plants in space. Now, you might be thinking, why do we need to even think about growing plants in space? Like, what is the possible benefit that that could provide? Well, on a recent NASA behind the scenes trip, I can't even believe I get to mutter those words, behind the scene strip of a NASA launch and also a SpaceX launch for the goes you satellite. I was honored to be among this group called NASA Social, which is essentially a PR effort from NASA and from all of the 1000s of workers that work for the company in order to raise brand awareness around what they do. Not that NASA needs brand awareness at all, but be able to give creators from all walks of life an inside look as to what goes into a NASA launch. Also, SpaceX was part of this mission because it was a mission for the goes you satellite and so just a little bit of a background on the reason that I was at NASA is because there's this NASA Social thing that they are a program that they have, and periodically throughout the year, they used to do a lot of them, pre COVID, now post COVID, they've had a couple of these NASA social events. Well, they will invite influencers, creators from all over the country to come and get you know, sort of a behind the scenes tour of a launch. Hopefully be able to witness a launch. I was very lucky in that this was my third or fourth time applying for this NASA Social program. Finally got there, was able to do. The tour got accepted into the program and or the I guess it's considered a program anyways. But one of you know, launches are very testy because of the Florida weather, especially in this time of year, which is June, so summertime rainy storms in the afternoon, damn near every day in the state of Florida. So launches can be a little you know, timing is important, and so for a lot of these folks, it was kind of waiting on pins and needles, just hoping that you will be able to see the launch at the end of the two day tour. We were lucky enough for that to happen. So basically it's two days of recording content all over the place, doing different tours and talking to different folks from different positions all over NASA, which was just incredible. So this is part of I don't want to give an exact number right now. I'm looking at about five episodes, but I don't want to limit myself to just five episodes, because I met so many freaking smart people on this trip, and so I will be talking to more of those experts, especially when it comes to logistics and weather and how both of those things affect, you know, supply chains all across the globe. So that is coming soon, but with all of that said in this episode, going to be talking about how to grow plants in space. And this is one part of the tour that was just endlessly fascinating to me. You can see the plants behind me. If you're listening on audio, you can't really see it, but you can kind of visualize it. But I am. I'm plant mom. I have probably close to 100 plants in my, you know, small, you know, duplex that I live in, in Jacksonville, Florida. And so I'm a plant enthusiast. And so when you when you think about the mission of NASA, the mission of SpaceX, and that is to extend humans beyond Earth, how do you make that happen? What are the logistics behind making that happen? And one of the key aspects of that is feeding your astronauts, feeding your smart people that are in space. And so that's exactly what this department does. And so I was honored enough to see that department behind the scenes, and get up close and personal with a lot of the different programs that they're doing, a lot of the different testing, how they're using technology and plans together, what kind of foods that they actually transport up into space. And so if any of that is interesting to you, this is going to be probably a really good episode for you to listen to. So hopefully you stay listening. Hopefully you stay watching. This is a I will say this is an episode, and all of the space logistics episodes, honestly, are going to be better viewed on YouTube. So if you are listening to the audio format, I'm going to try to explain it as best as I can, but to really get the full visual of everything that's going on in these space logistics episodes. You really want to watch the video version that's over on YouTube. Just search for everything as logistics, and you should be able to find that. And we will also work on creating a landing page for all of the space logistics episodes, and I'll link to that in the show notes, just to make it easy for folks. In case you do find this in the podcast format and you want to be able to watch the video format. So with all of that said, let's get into it. Okay, so sort of set the stage a little bit for this video. This is so we're, we're inside one of the NASA buildings, and we're taking, being, taking from sort of room to room, from expert to expert, and just learning more and more about different things. So in this first clip, I'm going to show you the entry to the sort of space plants area, which is really cool. I'm probably not going to do this for other videos, but it is cool for the space plants area because you have a lot of botanists in there. You have a lot of people from all different kinds of career backgrounds that are working specifically on this issue of trying to grow plants, trying to test them, and trying to test different growing conditions with or without water, with or without different lighting. But before we get into that building, before Matthew the tour guide, host and one of the botanist experts that are working for NASA. I'm going to let him kind of take over. But first I wanted to show you this, sort of like walk in part, which is really interesting, because they have, you know, different, you know, big murals. In case you're just listening to the different murals on how they're using different space, plant growing, just, you know, quotes on the wall, things like that. But in this next video, it's kind of funny. You can see that they have a little bit of a sense of humor, because they have aliens that are growing plants. And it's on one of the doors, very clearly it's aliens. And, you know, it's probably just poking fun at a lot of the different.

Blythe Brumleve: 50:00

Jokes. And then, you know, as we're walking into the building or into the room where Matthew is about to start giving his part of the tour, you can also see the sticky flooring on the ground, which you can also hear that as you're walking in, everybody has to step on this sticky floor to get rid of anything, you know, any kind of contaminants that might be on your feet. So I thought that that was really interesting. And, you know, I wanted to make sure that y'all saw that. So with all of that, really said, I'm going to play the Matthews intro, his basically what his entire department does, chamber area.

Unknown: 50:41

So we basically do all of our ground research to figure out what's the best way to grow crops in space. Here, we do a lot of our screening in terms of what's the best crops to select, but also, can we grow crops in environmental conditions that are relevant for space. So for instance, here on the ground, this is basically where we would be. We study different hardware systems, different technologies, also human factors, testings. We do have taste testings, because what we grow, we got to make sure it tastes okay for the fruit, because that's important. The psychological aspect of crops in space is, you know, of high value, because abstracts, when they are in space, they do lose weight. And so there's an there's a phenomenon called menu fatigue. You know, their diet is mostly packaged, and so there's not a lot of diversity. And sometimes fresh crops can actually help solve that. And so that's a big place where plants actually can be of benefit.

Matthew Mickens: 51:48

But also we utilize the International Space Station because it is a platform where, or even a laboratory where we can have access to microgravity, right? You have to imagine trying to grow crops when there's no gravity, using water water becomes totally different, and actually becomes a big challenge when we're talking about growing crops. And so right now, in the ISS, you can see we've had these two big logos here. Those are our two main plant growth platforms. One is called the vegetable production chamber. We call it veggie. That's our simplest chamber. It's just basically lights and fans, and it actually the plants we grow in there share the environment with the food.

Unknown: 52:29

The more advanced system is the advanced plant habitat. We're doing what our brain for today looks like. So the advanced plant habitat has over 180 different sensors. It's completely sealed and closed. Pretty much you can control your seal to very precisely, but also has more advanced lighting and watering, active watering capabilities. And so we've basically been growing crops in these two platforms since 2014 but still we've got a long way to go. And so basically from ISS. And as you may know, ISS will be retiring by the year 2030, and so the next platform is gateway. Gateway will be in a further out orbit, what we call cislunar space. It will allow us to have access to a higher radiation environment. It will be quite small, smaller than the ISs, but still valuable in terms of allowing us to further plant research. And then, of course, we are going back to the moon. And so we are working, actually, with the Canadian Space Agency, on how we can have different demonstrators between crops on the surface of the moon, but also the lunar surface is going to be a huge opportunity to get practice. But when we go to Mars, which is next, so we've got the Mars transit vehicle area where plant growth will be required, that's a nine month trip at least. And so then we're talking about moving away from research and actually utilizing plants as a supplemental food option for the fruit. So it's going to be even more important that we figure out, you know, what's the best in terms of food safety, or, you know, what's the practical the most beneficial crops for a transit mission. And then surface habitats, of course, that'll allow us to grow, you know, in larger footprints, larger crops, you know, even staple crops like corn or soybeans, things like that, or even utilizing techniques such as hydroponics. So you can see in all of these aspects of space, space exploration, plant growth, research, or plant growth as a supplement to the diet is going to be necessary. All right. So again, this is just a high level road map, but you can see where we all fit in. Are you in freight sales with a book? Business looking for a new home, or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership. These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called The freight agent trenches, sponsored by SPI logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, it and sales, but I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations, or if you're ready to make the jump, visit SPI3pl.com, any questions so far? Are there different plants that are more sensitive to space conditions than others? You guys have a sort of area of plant that is better for it that you guys really good question. So we have grown crop. Actually, the pictures that you can see on the wall above you, you can see Scott Kelly and Kelvin are eating lettuce, and then Peggy puts it in growing cabbage. So for instance, our cabbage crop didn't grow as well. And you know, it can be a combination of the lack of gravity, but also, like LED lighting, or elevated CO tubes, like all of those things, can cause issues for different crops. Some crops can do better. Some crops not so much. And so this is where we can actually simulate those conditions here to figure out, well, what products can we spread out that makes sense. How accurate was Matt Damon and on Mars growing the potatoes. I love that movie. Any scientist watching that movie. As a scientist, you come pick things out. I don't know how safe it would be to use species as fertilizer. You know, that's in my mind. I'm the point of contact for the safety air and trying to figure out what are the hazards of E coli. You don't want any opportunities for that, but also raw potatoes, that is something that is actually not new we so let me bring you over here. This model here that you see, this is called the biomass production team. It was active here at Kennedy Space Center at Hangar L, from 1987 to the year 2000 and in this it's basically a completely closed chamber, but it actually had different layers, like vertical farms. And NASA was actually vertical farming before vertical farming existed. And one of the crops that grew in there were hydroponic potatoes. So actually, the movie kind of got some of its intel from research that we had already been doing here for 20 years. Wow. And so it's no longer existing now, but it's been, you know, in terms of being a pioneer for what we call controlled environment, agriculture, all of that actually started here in the efforts for space boxes. Yes, it is, I was actually going to get to that. So growing beyond Earth definitely is an outreach tool that we've had in collaboration with middle schools and high schools in Florida. So yeah, we have these in the classrooms, where the students can actually grow plants and make recommendations for us here at NASA on what's the next prop for us to fly who base? And so far, we've actually gotten at least two crops as recommendations for us and we fly and we plumb them as a result of the citizen science research that happens in the growing beyond Earth program. I think one of them was drag on lettuce and pop tour. Those were the two crops that they were that they ended up recommending to us, and we blew them, and they grew great, and we actually have some drag room going in one of the tanks. Now. Do you have any recommendation of I'm an educator. I'm a director of STEM at a private school. I have a greenhouse that was just installed, and I'm using the average economy aeroponic towers. So they're eight feet tall. They dribble in three minutes. Turns off 12 minutes. I can have between 54 and a half and 44 crops, depending on the density of the root ball. They go in the cocoa pod. Things, is there anything that we can do citizen scientists, wise, that you're aware of, botanically, that we can provide data to experimentations. I have a GbE box that we're also going to put in a classroom. I have this big, huge greenhouse I can use, and it has a super, super duper, highly controlled system that's run by some vision anyway, but all electric. Automatically control humidity, everything's everything's there. Is there any program that you can think of off the top of your head that might be possible for us to do something for tests that would be beneficial for us? Yes, is there something like I use NASA's best curriculum for engineering? Is there's something already out there that I might not be aware of because GbE was all like the fact, and you don't have to answer me now, yeah, yeah, no, because I'm actually I've been working with some of the GbE educators as well, and I think we're in a process of coming up with a curriculum for something that may help us. Like, for instance, I mentioned menu fatigue and taste profile. I know with the GbE boxes, you can tune the color of the lights. And so I was actually kind of recommending that they see if they can modify their taste, like for instance. So in the microgravity environment, astronauts sometimes have reported losing or diminishing their sense of taste, and so a lot of them are asking for spicier foods. So I was wondering, you know, well, can we modify the taste in space using the lighting that's already available? What about the intensity of the UV light that they get by comparing that? Or is that less interesting than the color of the light? Well, that is saying you can change the color of the light itself. Light recipes, basically, and that will and certain spicy crops, or, like arugula, bread slice. It's one of the crops that I've been trying to push, because you can change the taste by changing, for instance, a ratio of certain colors. And so that's just one thing I was thinking about the top of my head. So But great question. Anybody else? Okay, I know we don't have much time. You got something? Yeah, so that's green works. It's kind of like our miscellaneous area for like, where we start experiments. We want to try something out quickly. If we have time, I would. I'll try to take you over there. But for now, I can mention you may see a lot of tall flowering plants in the corner there. Yeah. So we've got some projects where we're actually growing plants for teas. We've got chamomile growing and so that was trying to actually purposely grow it to flower, to have potential plants that can be made into teas. Okay, and since Matthew just mentioned growing teas and some of the other plants that they were experimenting on in the other room, I'm going to fast forward just a little bit to show you some of those plants and some of those teas that they are growing. So I'll hit play on that now. And if you couldn't hear in one of the other videos before it cut off, it's it's probably going to be a future story over on the NASA team, because they mentioned specifically that we know still the T is probably going to be, you know, a blog post or a social post in the future for the NASA Social team. So I thought that that was cool, too, all right, and in these next couple of clips, we're actually going to be going to the different chambers, and being able to take a peek inside of with some of these chambers and how they're simulating the different growing, I guess, experiences that these plants are going to be having, and also testing the actual plant health for when they face, you know, some kind of adversity, you know, in space, and how they react to it in space. And it's really interesting that you know that just at the cellular level, with a lot of plants, and just even the human body in general, it reacts differently in space. And so they're on here on Earth, and inside these chambers, they're trying to test those different environments. So so here's what that process looks like. But the idea of using these walk in chambers is because, I mean, it gives us an opportunity to simulate the environmental conditions on Space Station, in particular the CO two but also temperature and humidity. Now, in this chamber, actually, this is a project that's headed by one of our postdoctoral scientists, Dr Luke Fauci, the plants are here are growing on a hydroponic center. Okay, so I had to cut that video off just for a second there, but I'm going to bring up the next clip of him talking a little bit more in depth just about the different plant health monitoring and also the effects of light therapy on plants, reflective imaging and even Lidar and so and this project, in collaboration with the USDA and the army, is basically how do we use plant health monitoring to. Solving problem. For instance, we're purposely drowning some of these plants. Starting tomorrow, we're going to stop watering the plants to see if we can actually image a stress response. If we can actually predict or see the plants getting stressed before they start wilting, it'll allow us to tell the crew like, hey, it's time to make an adjustment or water the plants before they actually lose their food. And so plant health monitoring is an aspect that we're trying to push here for mission applications. No they have no idea what's coming. So let me get to yes, they do request spicier food sometimes, because they do have a diminished sense of taste because of the fluid shifts in microgravity. Um, so yes, transit missions, they we want to be able to, and actually, I'm working on a project now where we can, I'm trying to actually increase the intensity of a flavor of the crop by changing the light recipe. We have the capability, just haven't really tested it yet. So I want to try to test that, to see if we can allow to prove that capability to do that. Oh, yeah. Oh, a lot of the things like, yes, like Thanksgiving holidays, they request a lot of the things that you know, they would normally get from home, and we shift it up to them, for sure, yep. What kind of things are y'all 3d printing from Saturday? Yeah, that's a good question. I usually will show that stop. So we do 3d print materials, like, for instance, trellises that we use to kind of train the plants. I think we might have some love that little clip at the end with one of the other creators that was on site. And, you know, we're all sort of, you know, kind of competing to get as much footage as we can, and so you can kind of see it, not just in this video, but some of our other space logistics videos, all right. And just to sort of round out this discussion and at the end of it, and apologies again if you were listening on audio, this is going to be much better for you if you actually watch the video. But I'm going to run through a few of the images that we were able to, that I was able to snap while on this particular part of the tour. So let's run through some of these images. And now what you're looking at on the screen right now is basically one of the chambers. And so in front of each of the chambers, they have basically a lot of, you know, the different, you know, scientists, sort of stats, you know, the start date, the finish date, the duration, what they're actually testing for, environmental set points. So there was a bunch of these chambers just all over the room and all over the space that we were in. There were also, you know, different scientists that were walking around, basically walking around the tour, and just getting their job done. So they paid us no mind. They were completely focused on exactly what they were supposed to be working on. So if you're looking at the screen, here are a few more images. Just, you know, kind of, I thought that these were fun, just kind of showing off a little bit of the humor, very similar to the aliens farming the plants to enter into this part of the tour. But then also, you know, some of the signage that they have all around, you know, the this one in particular, saying, gardeners, know, all the dirt, and that is some of the tea that they are growing back there that you can see pictured here are some other different, you know, hydroponic systems that they were also testing as well. And so if you're looking at the little purple things. These are basically the water that they're trying to feed into the plants. Because if you think about it, you have to be very careful with how you water plants in space. There's no gravity, and so it's a little bit challenging to water plants in space. And so this was one of the ways, and one of the methods that they were testing from a hydroponic perspective here were just some other, just like, random, I think photos. What is this one? Yeah, these are different photos of different tours and things that you know that this particular division has participated in going through some of these other like, sort of B roll if I go, if I scroll back one more, really quick, you can see some of the different plants, the the leafy greens that they were talking about. So that's going on in this particular clip of some of the astronauts that were able to, you know, eat some of those leafy greens. And they mentioned that basically, leafy greens, and the reason that they grow so many of them in space, is because they reproduce and they grow really quickly, and they also survive a lot of different, you know, environmental things here on planet Earth. And so it's thought that they would be able to survive better, or be one of the more efficient plants to also grow in space, considering the protein count and the nutrition. Question. Here's more of the tea that I thought was also really cool. Just, you know, cool, different video footage. You might have seen that earlier, but I'm going to play it again. Let's see what else we got. Oh, the here's some of the chambers that I'm going through, and you can kind of see all of these different experiments that are going on. I And in that particular clip, these are the poor plants that they were actually going to be drowning the next day just to stress test them in order to see if they'll be able to survive that stress test. And, yeah, that kind of ends it for the B roll, all alright. Well, that about does it for this special episode of our space logistics series. I hope you all enjoyed it, and hopefully you were able to watch it, and if you were listening, hopefully it was still enjoyable, even if you didn't watch it. But if you do want to watch it, I highly encourage you to check that link in the show notes, or head on over to our YouTube channel over it. Everything is logistics, and you'll be able to see the full version, but be on the lookout for other episodes from our space logistics series that are going to be coming out in the coming weeks. We're going to be talking about Deep Space logistics. We're going to be talking about what goes into a NASA launch. We're going to be talking about, you know, the infrastructure that you have to set up in space itself. And then we're also going to be hearing from those scientists from NOAA. That is the national, oceanic, Atmospheric Association. I don't I think it's not Association. It's something else. So I'm blanking on that, but we will get that hold on. I'm just going to look it up right now. So no, aa, yes. Administration, not association. So administration, nationalist, Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So be on the lookout for that episode. I will have that acronym correct by then. So thank you all for listening, and hope you enjoyed it. Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. My name is Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics. And in this episode, I'm happy to welcome in Justin Fauci. He is the CEO and co founder of inversion space. And we're going to be talking about building the next shipping container and transporting it to and from space, which is super exciting. And then obviously, you know, very, very very relevant to this show, especially after doing our NASA series that debuted in August. And so as a little bit of a follow up, we kind of talked about your company Justin on a recent episode, and was able to get connected with you and have you on. So I'm pumped to have this conversation. All that to say, welcome, yeah, thank you for having me on. Really excited to talk about this logistics is like, what makes the world tick, and we want to bring a new modality to that. So excited to share more about inversion and what we're building. And I have to ask just, like, off the off the RIP, like this feels like the most exciting, like, just space in general, feels like the most exciting industry to be a part of right now. Is that a similar feeling for you? I would imagine, yeah, there's a lot of really cool stuff happening right over the last 10 years or so, getting to space has become very available, you know, mainly thanks to SpaceX and then bringing the cost of launch down, but also the frequency of launch, right? They're flying, you know, every other day, every, every three days, something like that. And so there's been this kind of explosion of of entrepreneurship in the space industry. A lot of people coming from SpaceX, a lot of people based in Los Angeles, and it's a really cool domain to operate in, right? There's kind of a

Justin Fiaschetti: 1:13:38

very high risk, high reward aspect, where you can only test in space by going to space, right? You can't do stuff on the ground fully to see if it works, or you can test a little bit, but at the end of the day, you put it in space, you see if your thing works, and then if it does. You know, that's a really big reward for stuff.

Unknown: 1:13:57

So how did you take me back to sort of that light bulb moment for you that you decided that because I don't believe you have a history in or a career history in logistics. So how did you know that this was some a problem to solve? Yeah, so we founded the company about or we came up with the idea for the company about about four years ago at this point, and it was myself and my co founder, sitting around after dinner one night, we were doing the dishes, and honestly, we were just kind of talking about, like, what is coming next in the space industry. We were both working at rocket companies at the time, and what we realized was that space as like, kind of like a platform, offers the value of being able to cover the whole globe with very little infrastructure, right? Two use cases right now for space are communications from space, I think, like satellite internet. Starlink is a, is a kind of the prevalent example, or Earth observation, right, taking pictures of the Earth. And so really, what those are taking advantage of is very few things can cover. The entire globe, including remote areas, at a cheaper and faster rate than you would be able to do terrestrially. And so what they're returning is data, right? They're returning they're returning bits information. And we asked ourselves, Well, what if you could return atoms back? And the kind of way we came up with the exact idea is a little funny. It was wildfire season in Los Angeles, right? The sky was like red from all the smoke. It was raining ash. And I asked my co founder, I was like, hey, what if we could drop water on wildfires wherever they started, you know, in a very short period of time, put them out before they got big. We've quickly realized that wouldn't totally work, because you need a lot of water to do that. But then we started realizing, well, hey, like you can, you can store cargo in space and have it, that piece of cargo have access to the entire globe and land it very quickly. And you can, by doing so, create, create one hour delivery to the entire globe. So that's kind of where inversion got started, as we decided to go and build fully autonomous re entry vehicles that can store cargo in space and then on demand, deliver it to anywhere on Earth. And so the way it works is you take these, these re entry vehicles, you load them with the cargo on the ground, you launch a bunch of them into space, into low earth orbit, and then when they kind of just sit there, they just hang out there until they're needed. And then once they're needed, you give them a GPS location to go and land at, and they'll fly fully autonomously and land within 50 feet of accuracy. And so are the re entry vehicles. Are almost the warehouses that are in space. It's not necessarily like that. You have a warehouse that you're building in space, and you're shipping goods to and from it. The entry vehicle acts as the warehouse, correct? That's exactly right, yeah. Imagine that the shipping container is also the way you store your cargo around the globe, right? And that shipping container can get moved wherever it needs to get moved to, yeah. And so with the, I guess, the cargo delivery, because at first, I believe you're focusing on, you know, sort of a department defense or disaster logistics, healthcare related items in an emergency remote areas, I believe, as well, is that an accurate statement? Yep, that's where we're starting off, because the main kind of thing we focus on at the company is providing enough value for the cost that this is and in all of those settings, even today, with current prices of getting to and from space, those those clothes, from a business model perspective. But as we bring that cost down through reusability, through just mass manufacturing, you start to open up many more markets as well that just want to have the ability to access the whole globe very quickly. And so it's probably though, those high revenue items, like you said, stuff, that you're probably going to make, you know, money off of so that you can be profitable, so that you can continue to, you know, run a business. And so for, I don't imagine, or do you imagine that, you know, that's going to be like, I don't know, delivering sunglasses to, you know, my backyard one day that that's, do you see that as, like, a future likelihood, or probably not, because of the the cost associated with it. So when we think about the, like, terminal cost of this, right? Where is this going to end end up? We expect that it will actually be at roughly the same increment as going from shipping by boat to shipping by plane, as it will shipping by plane to shipping by space, right? It will be like roughly that amount of Delta, and it will be actually even faster as a percentage basis in time between space delivery and aircraft delivery. So, you know, do we deliver sunglasses by planes today? Like we don't, right? We deliver, like, big, you know, high priority items, whether that be mail or or overnight shipping, right? But you we've gotten to the place as a society where the speed of shipping by plane people are willing to pay for just because it's faster, right, not because they necessarily need that that item in a shorter period of time. But it makes more business sense, it makes more personal sense to have that cargo shipped by air freight rather than by by ocean freight. And we expect that same thing to happen. So is it sunglasses? My bet would be like and kind of like those kind of level of consumer goods. Sometimes, I would say sometimes, if it's really high priority, right? Sometimes, I'll have you know, I guess no one would have thought 30 minute delivery of food would be something people would be willing to pay extra for, when you can just go and drive to get the food. But turns out, people love convenience, but I think that what we're building is a new platform, right? It's a new method of delivery. And there will be a lot of new business cases that we can't even conceptualize today that will come up because of this, right? If you go to a bunch of entrepreneurs and say, you can touch anywhere on the. An hour. What can you do with it? That's really exciting, like, I'm pumped to hear about what that what comes from that. So for a big moment, I guess that happened in shipping is sort of the standardization of the container, and using the container, you know, for cargo ships to that can go on to trucks, I can go on to trains. I'm curious if the some of the reentry vehicles, are they going to be sort of standardized, or what do those re entry vehicles look like? Because I believe you, you have Ray, and then you also have arc, can you kind of, I guess, break down what the standardization looks like, and maybe those different types of of reentry vehicles that you're building. Yeah, so Ray is our tech demonstrator. It's gonna be launching in the next few months to space and landing off the coast of California, really just meant for internal technology development, getting data on all of our systems that we can then go and apply to arc. And arcs kind of our main product, and we're really excited about that. It'll be launching for the first time in 2026 and that is what goes and does that precision landing and global delivery of cargo as it currently stands. You can think about the re entry vehicles. I would call it like a Ford Transit van, right where you can store stuff in it and you can deliver it together. And that's like a good way to go right now, just because the economics of how expensive is to put stuff in space at the moment, favor that kind of, like delivery and storage at the same time. And so, like, we're a little early to start standardizing the actual container inside of the reentry vehicle. Right? A reentry vehicle, you can generally think about is it's like, the equivalent of like a train or a truck or a boat, right? Is it? Is it is the method of movement, right, rather than the method of storage at a high level, we are combiding those two to start right? We are saying we're going to have a payload bay inside of the reentry vehicle. That is standard, but it is intrinsic to the reentry vehicle. It is removable, you know, to some extent, right to access the cargo, but the cargo is not meant to be necessarily stored inside of the payload bay independent of the re entry vehicle, right? There's power constraints, that there's power hookups, there's software hookups, mechanical hookups, that require the reentry vehicle to start. But that will probably change. It will probably change over time to where there are various different sizes of re entry vehicles. There are various different types that you want a standardized set of cargo so that the high value, expensive thing, which is the re entry vehicle, compared to the payload container, can be separate and they can be interchangeable. So you can have five re entry vehicles and 50 payload bays with different types of payload. But to start the the the overhead and the like total, like capex, to build out that method would be too high, and so you start with that kind of for transit van where can do both. That that's, I guess you know, it's really reassuring to me, because I was thinking before this interview that there was going to just be a bunch of just giant warehouses up in space. And, you know, as someone who, you know, I think a lot of us all love, you know, gazing up at the stars. And there's, you know, kind of a little bit of controversy around a lot of the satellites that are going into space, and they're messing up, you know, the star gazing. And I just thought to myself, well, what do we have? All these, you know, big ass warehouses in space, and then there's blocking it even more so it this. It makes me feel better about the whole, you know, just, I guess stargazing ability is that you won't have, well, maybe you will have giant warehouses in space. I imagine that's kind of what the ISS technically is, even though the humans can live on it as well, yep. And I mean, I'll give an example here, right? So the International Space Station is, you know, could be that giant warehouse, right? And then you might have, like, smaller re entry vehicles that pop off of it. The International Space Station was $100 billion to build, right? And so that's going to be a longer term thing, right? We'll get to that eventually. To start, we will have those the capsules have the cargo itself. But the International Space Station is about the size of a football field or so, which is roughly the size of like Airbus A 380 right, the largest airplane that you have flying. But the International Space Station is really far away from you, right? It's about 307 or 75, to 400 kilometers away. So it's tiny. It looks tiny compared to an airplane flying over top of you. And there are, at any given time, 5000 10,000 airplane in the sky, and that's not a huge deal for scar, for stargazing, right? And for astronomy, it has some impact, but not a huge impact. So we actually think that from from that perspective, it will end up being even more favorable, because just so far away, and they're relatively small, compared to, you know, the moon or something, right? So I'm, I'm curious as to because, especially for logistics, I've been working logistics for you. A little over a decade now, and it's seen sort of this tech evolution, especially since COVID, you know, when the world shut down and everybody kind of found out, you know, how important supply chains were or are. And for, I think for a lot of folks within the industry, especially a lot of the veterans, they are apprehensive to new technology to change I'm curious if, I'm wondering if maybe your advantage of not working in logistics has helped you create a new logistics company, because you were almost on the outside looking in. Were any like logistics professionals or veterans consultants kind of helping along the way with, you know, it's sort of the early days of inversion, or even now, or, or is it really just been like, what can we think of that's new, and let's, let's carve this new path, yeah. So, um, you know, we have, we have a lot of folks we talk to, and I try to learn from, like, literally every place I possibly can, we try to take lessons from existing logistics systems and things like that. But especially on the military side, we have, like a lot of folks we talk to on how they do logistics and how they do, you know, global force projection and that kind of stuff at a fundamental level, like logistics today are almost entirely about cost reduction and timeliness, right? Like, the way that you win is a business in logistics is you are like, two or 3% cheaper than the next person, and then, like, and maybe you run like, a little bit better at being on time, which is, like, fine, because, like, airplanes are commoditized, boats are commoditized. Like that is, that is like, we are at a technological limit, effectively on all of those systems, right? Yes, there are some things you can do to optimize, but, like the built world is, is really great at moving cargo right now, in large masses. Our perspective is generally that, like, if you can do something with the old paradigm, you should do it with the old paradigm. Like, if you could do global delivery of cargo in under an hour, like with an aircraft, like, you should probably go do that, because it's gonna be, like, easier. And like, they already exist, and you don't have to, like, reinvent the wheel. But like fundamentally, it is not possible, from a cost or a time perspective to have that fast of access to middle of the ocean, remote areas and broadly just you would otherwise have to have an entire global supply chain as an individual user, right, whether that be the military Red Cross, whomever and so. So what we are offering is, like, at a fundamentally a different optimization than what current logistics optimize around. Yes, we need to reduce costs as much as possible. We're not fighting for percentage points, right? We're fighting for like, 10x speed reduction, or, you know, increase in speed. We're fighting for like, can we cut the cost in half in the next two years? Can we cut it by 10x in the next 10 years? And as such, like, our volumes also aren't high enough right now that, like, you know, traditional logistics planning methodologies work super well. Like, how do you distribute like, 15 things around the globe, right? Like, that's a lot simpler of a problem than, how do you distribute like, 50,000 you know, shipping containers around the globe, or however many there are, it's probably more than that's my guess. So. So we think about it a lot that way, but fundamentally, we're not trying to build technology to solve or to be better at an existing thing. We're trying to build a new capability for humanity, and that does require some technology, you know, innovations to go and do, yeah. I mean, as you were talking, I was just thinking of, you know, obviously the disaster that just happened when, after Hurricane Helene. And you know, there's so many people that are stranded on tops of mountains and, you know, roads you can't get to these people. And you know, sometimes they're they're trying to do, you know, helicopter flybys and things like that. And so is that a situation where a company like inversion, could come in and drop some much needed supplies in areas that are greatly impacted, where traditional transportation methods just don't work. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the nice thing about what we're doing is the cargo is location agnostic. So if it's a hurricane in, you know, in North Carolina, if it's an earthquake in in Japan, if it's, if it's a tsunami, you know, somewhere, generally you need food, you need water, you need medical supplies, right? And you need, like, some sort of shelter or power to to or for heat. And so we don't need to pre plan where that cargo is going to. Get delivered, because we won't know Right? And so we can be very responsive in those settings where, hey, there is a lost hiker right in the middle of Alaska or something like that, and they probably need roughly the same cargo as, you know, the stranded family from a hurricane. And our goal is to make it so that whenever that happens, right, we can bring it, bring that cargo, down and support them. Now, right? Now, it's too expensive to do that for an individual to pay for that, right? We want to expect that to be a great business model for you and me to, you know, constantly have access to that cargo. But what we can do is basically distribute the costs, right? So, you know, just like triple A is a distributed cost where if you need roadside assistance, great, you can get it, but you don't have to pay for the, you know, the tow truck always, right? You can share that cost with a bunch of people. And that's also kind of how Red Cross operates, a little bit, right, where you and I could benefit from Red Cross, but we don't have to necessarily fund the whole organization ourselves, and we see that as being, especially on the kind of disaster relief, humanitarian relief side of things, how that will generally work, where there's a collective payment in order to deliver supplies to individuals. And so what does walk me through the process of, say, I'm a Department of Defense, you know worker, or maybe you know disaster logistics. Worker, do I am I? Am I booking a load? Am I am I tracking the load like? What does the whole like, I guess, start to finish process look like? Yeah, so from our perspective, or from, sorry, from the customer's perspective, the Department of Defense or the Red Cross worker. All they do is they say, they say, inversion, we would love to have this type of cargo be able to access in these areas at any given time, right. They hand us the cargo, and then we say, Great. Let us know when you want it right. And then they tell us when and where they want it, and they will get it right. We take care of all of the all of the logistics of mounting the hardware in the vehicle, or, sorry, the cargo in the vehicle, launching it, monitoring it while it's in space, doing any sort of debris avoidance that we have to do. And then once they need it, we tell that piece of cargo, that re entry vehicle, to come down and land where they asked it for. So we want to abstract away all the complexities of operating in space for our customers, right? A good analogy here is the internet. Right? It used to be that you had to be an internet company to use the internet, right? You had to have, like, an IT staff and like, like software, like developers and like to have an internet presence, anything like that. But now every single company is an internet company, right? Nike sells tons of shoes online, but they're not, you wouldn't consider them a tech company, or an internet company, necessarily, and so that's kind of our goal. Is that everyone is using space as a cargo delivery method. Doesn't mean they have to be a space company, just like they don't need to be an air, you know, an airline company today to ship cargo, you know, via DHL or FedEx or whatever. And is it the same kind of cargo in each re entry vehicle, or is it different cargo for different purposes, like, you know, Department of Defense probably has, you know, maybe theoretically, 15 of their own, that they can put whatever they want in. American Red Cross has, you know, their own, that they can put that, you know, their own supply in. Or is it just, you know, IV bags all in one or something like that? Yeah. So, so each type of cargo would have multiple re entry vehicles that it's in, so that you have that kind of coverage, right? It's like a network of those capsules to make sure there's one over top of everywhere at any given time. So let's say I would have, you know, a set of capsules, a set of re entry vehicles with, you know, IV bags. I have another set with, you know, radios, and another set with communications equipment, and they would all be in space, and they would kind of be their own network, basically. What about the, I guess, the cargo on re entry? How do you know if it gets damaged, or if I don't know, like radiation affects it? Or that question actually came from a friend of the friend of the show, Thomas Watson, who's also a logistics professional and content creator, so he was really excited about this interview as well, and that was his question is, what happens to the cargo on re entry? Of is it insurance involved in this process at all? Yeah. So there are kind of three phases of flight for the cargo. There's the launch while it's on the rocket, there's the staying in space until it's needed. And then there's the re entry. Each phase has slightly different challenges that we try to take on as inversion so that the cargo doesn't have to worry about it. So for launch, for example, it's very high vibrational environment, right? It gets shaken around quite a bit, and so we dampen the payload as much as we can to make sure that the cargo doesn't see any more vibration than it would on like a truck getting shipped across. The country, which actually has surprisingly high vibrational and shock loads. I was surprised at that once you're in space, now you're looking at, okay, radiation, temperature, pressure, that kind of stuff. And our payload bay is pressurized. It has temperature control. It has humidity control. We use like a dry nitrogen so that you don't have any oxidation, and it has radiation shielding to the extent that's needed. So our goal is, like, it's literally just a warehouse on the earth, except it happens to be in space right on the radiation point. A good example is, you know, we have people and cargo up in space currently for, you know, extended durations. On the International Space Station, there's a very thin shell of aluminum that is what protects it from any sort of damaging radiation. And so we have blood in space. We have, you know, we have medical supplies in space. And NASA signed off that all of that is totally good for all of their astronauts. And that will be the same for this cargo once you then re enter, once you kind of enter the atmosphere. Now you have to deal with the heat of re entry, right? It gets very hot, you know, surface of the temperature of the surface of the sun on the outside of our vehicle. And so we have special thermal protection materials that surround the reentry vehicle to make sure that that temperature doesn't get into the cargo. And we also can do an actively, an actively chilled system for the cargo. Once you land, you just grab it as if it was, as if it was dropped from a drone, and it's dropped via a parachute, right? That's right, yeah. So once we've kind of, once the reentry vehicle has entered the atmosphere, and we've start to get, you know, close to the ground, call it like 10 to 15,000 feet, we deploy our parachute, and the parachute is steerable, just like skydivers parachute might be. And so that lets us do that kind of very accurate, targeted landing, rather than, like, if you just have, like, a big round parachute, it could drift, if there's wings or what have you. And because we land under parachute, rather than, like, you know, using like wings and a runway, like a space plane might, or having a rocket engine that fires to slow us down because we're under parachute, we can land near people. We can land in austere environments, so we don't have to have a landing site necessarily perfectly clear, and because it's steerable, we can avoid obstacles like trees and that kind of thing. So is it just kind of someone sitting in an office, maybe with like a VR headset on steering the parachute? Or how does that work? How does the steering Yeah, so it's actually fully autonomous. Arc. Does it all on its own? So arc has a bunch of sensors on board to know where it is, where it is in the world, to know how far it is off the ground, to know where things are on the ground, we use a combination of computer vision and classical, classic like guidance, navigation control systems in order to like land super accurately. And you can adjust the landing site if you have to, and so it can like divert to a different spot if you happen to move, or if the landing site has no longer is no longer viable, and then flies, and we do this cool maneuver at the end where we, like, flare the parachute so that we softly touch down, just like a skydiver kind of runs out there. They're they're landing, and that means that the cargo doesn't have, like, a big load when it hits the ground. Oh, that's super interesting. And I'm curious, for, you know, for a lot of I would imagine Department of Defense items. I'm sure you get asked the, you know, security question of, how do you protect this kind of cargo in space? So what I mean? I'm sure you can't reveal everything, but what is, sort of the general overview that you can tell us? Yeah, so, you know, in space right now, there's kind of a, you know, a big kind of realignment where we space is no longer a peaceful like there's no one else that can touch our satellites. It's what's considered a contested environment. Now, you know, countries like China and Russia have the capability to shoot down satellites. China has the capability to move satellites, and so that's a that is a that is a problem that every space company is wondering about and looking at, at a fundamental level, though, there it's really no different than if you have, like, cargo on an island somewhere or in a base somewhere, right? You have people know where it is, and you need to make sure that you can either move it quickly if they're coming to grab it, or make sure that they don't know where it is as easily as as other cargo might be. So there's not like it's I think it's less of a risk than what most people would expect. The other thing is, because we have, like, a network of capsules. Sorry, I use capsules and re entry vehicles interchangeably. So sorry if that's that's been confusing to listener, because there's a network of them, like, if one gets captured, like, there's another one that's coming, like, 20 minutes later. And so it's very difficult to like, to. Capture all of them. Yeah, because that was, I was watching this document, I'm not sure if you, maybe you've seen it the the wild, wild space, or, I think it's wild space that's on HBO, and it's a really interesting look into what's kind of the the unregulated environment of space, and how it really is, like the Wild West. Have you seen that documentary yet I haven't seen that, is that the one with like Rocket Lab and Astra is, am I thinking of the right one? Okay, cool. I saw a bunch of stuff on Twitter about it, but I haven't seen it personally, but I'm quite familiar with those companies. So yes, it's, it's very fascinating look into just sort of the business of space and how it's evolving so quickly. And one of the crazier stats is that we have about 8000 I think, satellites in orbit, lower Earth orbit right now, but in the next 10 years, they estimate it to be over 100,000 and so it's just this, this, I guess, area. It's almost like Antarctica, where you're the whole bunch of, you know, sort of the global nations are going to come together and make some kind of a loose agreement. And so it's a little surprising that they don't have that yet, but I imagine it's probably going to take something happening in space, I think, for all of these countries to kind of wake up and maybe come up with that. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think it's, I don't know if I want regulation, and then I don't know if I do want regulation. It's kind of like that, that middle ground of where policy sort of stands, and I imagine that, you know, sort of working with the government on these things. Is it? Are they excited about going into space and, like, space logistics and things like that, or is it just become like another part of like a necessary part of the program for them. Yeah. So, you know, space has become kind of like this, this really exciting thing within the Department of Defense. Obviously, the Space Force was stood up maybe three or four years ago at this point. And so people are really starting to understand that space influences all aspects of the Department of Defense, whether it's, you know, GPS or communications or imaging for understanding, you know, troop movements and things like that. And cargo delivery, like I was kind of explaining at the beginning, is really just a another evolution of of what's already being done right right now we're taking pictures and transmitting that back to back to the ground. Now we're just going to store cargo and transmit that back to the ground, like I mentioned early, also like fundamentally, there's no other way to move as fast as you can and access as many parts of the globe as quickly as delivery from space Chem. And so the Department of Defense has, like, a number of programs that are that they're talking about, and have made announcements about around, like, rocket cargo and space delivery and that kind of stuff. And so I think people are really starting to understand, like, Oh, this is, like, a very valuable capability, and it's the kind of capability that once you have it's kind of hard to go back from right like, as in, like, once you are able to access the whole globe in under an hour, you never want to give up that capability. And in fact, everybody else now needs that capability too, because, you know, if the US can access or maybe just one part, like, let's say the Air Force can access every part of the globe in under an hour, well, the Navy is going to want to be able to do that too, and so is the army, and then our allied nations are going to want to do that as well, right? The US, or, sorry, the UK, Australia, Japan, those types of countries are going to want to be able to maintain kind of parity of capability. And so just like once the aircraft was invented and introduced, it was kind of like a Yep, we need this, and we're always going to have it, because it's so valuable. That's happening right now with with delivery from space, one of the things you mentioned earlier in from what I understand, there are companies now that do this, that track debris that are in space, and I just think that's so it's so crazy how the parallels of, you know, logistics and tracking that are right here on Earth are following us up into space as well. And so I'm curious, how do you account for space debris, and you know, something as small as a screw that could damage, you know, one of your vehicles? Or is that even a worry? Yeah, so, um, it's less of a worry than you would think. The debris is roughly, pretty well tracked, and it's very predictable. Like, orbits are very predictable for the most part. You can project months in advance if you're going to have a conjunction event, we have our arc vehicle has propulsion on it so it's able to move within its orbit. And so it can, it can, like, raise its orbit, can lower its orbit to avoid any debris that it might be coming up against. And so, like, space debris is this kind of like, it could be very scary, but it is, it is, it is manageable, just like. So having, you know, 1000s of airplanes flying around would have been very scary if there wasn't, like, you know, flight corridors and altitude requirements and stuff like that, and all of that is kind of starting to get put in place just kind of by, like, de facto, like, it's not necessarily, like, being mandated, but people are being very careful about where they're putting stuff, for the most part. So unless there is, like, a major, major event, and even if there is a major event, it only causes issues in like, a single orbital plane and at like, specific altitudes. So it's not like all of space is then just like completely destroyed. It's more like, it's more like, you know, this one area has, like, this one area within an orbit has a bunch of debris, or, you know, contamination, and so you just don't put stuff there until it degrades. But the other final point on debris is like, well, yes, it takes a while space debris orbits, they degrade, so we'll eventually enter the atmosphere. And so as long as you stay low enough, that happens in like a like a relatively reasonable time, like five to 10 years. So it's kind of like self cleaning. When you get higher altitudes, it like never comes down. And that's kind of a problem. But yeah, we think about debris, not a ton, and it's also nice, because we bring everything back with us. So we're never like, leaving stuff up in in space. So we think that that's going to probably become some of the norm in the future. It is kind of crazy how shipping lanes are evolving up into space. And I didn't even think about the different sort of orbital paths. I just thought, you know, once you're in the lower earth orbit, like, everybody's kind of in the lower earth orbit, but that would make sense that if, if it's going to burn up eventually for a lot of that debris, yeah, yeah. Like, you can think of low Earth orbit as, like, the Pacific Ocean, right? And like, within the Pacific Ocean, there's a bunch of different shipping lanes. There's, like, generally understood, of like, where you go, where you don't go, if you're about to have a collision, you're like, you know, who, who is responsible for correcting similar, same stuff in space? What about on the maintenance side of things? You know, I from watching, you know, sort of infrastructure being built in in space. One of the, bigger sort of light bulb moments for me was learning about, you know, different companies that are actually repairing satellites in space. What happens if one of, you know, an arc goes down? Can you perform that kind of maintenance on it in space? Or is that something where you would have to almost maybe transport it back or just burn it up into orbit? Or what happens there? Yeah. So, so for arc, if something goes wrong, depending on how critical, will generally just bring it back to landed in the US and recover it, refurbish it and re fly it right. Let's say, like, you know, one of the sensors goes bad, or something like that. That's pretty easy and straightforward to do. Me. Like, maintenance on satellites is an interesting topic, and we could go down a huge rabbit hole here, but you have this problem where the cost of the because you need another satellite to go, maintain the original satellite right, and you need to launch that other satellite. And so then you start asking the question, Well, why don't I just launch a new one of the satellite that I have to go and fix, right? And so, like, an analogy would be like, imagine if you needed an ocean liner to go and fix an ocean liner in the middle of the ocean. But once you fixed that first ocean liner, that maintenance ocean liner, is no longer useful. It's like, well, why wasn't that ocean liner just itself? The thing that why was the maintenance one itself, the valuable and usable system. So I actually maybe slightly different than the industry. Like, don't believe in, like, satellite maintenance and low Earth orbit for, like, further orbits. It might make sense. But there's this weird economics thing, which is, like, it's easier just to, like, fly a new one, right? And it's like, cheaper to go and fly a new one. And usually the sensors will have been, like, upgraded enough that you want to put a new one up anyway. Very true. So, but for arc, because arc is able to come back, we can reuse it, right? And so now you start to look at, well, now I like, For context, satellites are all single use today, right? You put them up, they last for a few years, five years, something like that, and then you have to put a new one up and like, that's like, continuously happens. For arc, though, we can put it up after five years, we bring it back, we refurbish it, and we can fly it again. So now you have that same piece of hardware being used, you know, four or five times. It actually brings the cost per mission down substantially compared to just a single use satellite. Yeah, I think it's the reusability of items going to and from space and in space, I think has been the biggest game changer, especially with SpaceX and Rocket Lab. How do you are those? I believe those are. Two companies that you use to that inversion uses to launch into space, correct? Yeah, so we're flying on SpaceX for our first mission, for Ray's mission that's coming up soon. We haven't we've yet to announce who we're flying with, with arc in 26 so that should be coming soon, though. How does it for folks who may not know, and I'm wondering if this may be true for for your future. You know, instance is that, from what I understand, you can just talk to SpaceX, and then they send you a link to book a flight, to go into space, and then you, you book it, you pay for it all online, and it takes about 15 minutes. Yep, no, exactly. I forget the URL. Otherwise I would, I would give it right now it's like SpaceX slash, like launch or SpaceX slash, like ride share, I think like that. And you can literally go in and put your credit card info. I think it's, I think you put your credit card info in. It's literally that simple. There's some like, back end paperwork that happens afterward, but they've streamlined it a ton. It used to be that, like, you had to know someone at NASA, and NASA had to, like, do this whole like, whole like, prioritization and stuff. But with SpaceX is pretty great. You like, go and you book your satellite, and once you book it, there's like, testing and stuff, and like making sure that your satellite will break apart on launch and hurt other satellites in the rocket itself. But they've made it, like, super streamlined and super straightforward. I think there's still, like, a lot of improvement that could happen. Generally, this is kind of like v1 of that, you know, our goal is a similar thing, which is like, you go online, you book it, and you literally just hand us the cargo and we take care of everything else. SpaceX isn't quite like that, because they serve other space companies, so there's not a need for them to do for them to do that. But we want to make it so anyone can put cargo in space and have it delivered when they need it, without consideration for any of the space aspects of it. Oh, that's super interesting. So you, I would imagine you would have a facility here in the United States where you're storing some of these goods before they're added to one of the vehicles before it's launched. That's right, yep, exactly, exactly. So we would have it where, you know, Red Cross, let's just use them as an example. Would give us a bunch of car they give us a bunch of pallets, and we do have an integration facility, probably on the West Coast, maybe on the East Coast, we would integrate their cargo into our arc vehicle. We would then put arc onto like a SpaceX rocket, and then watch Space. What's been the most challenging part of this whole journey for you that was maybe also surprising that you didn't think was going to be that challenging? Yeah, um, I think that, like, just generally, space is a hard place to build a company. Like, if you're building a software company, you can, like, write the software, make it kind of work, launch like, you know, deploy it and have customers start to use it and test it and upgrade it over time. Space, you don't really get that opportunity. You kind of get that one shot, right? You get one launch, and everything has to work. And so there's a lot of stuff that has to come together, right? There's 1000s of parts of the vehicle all have to come together at the same time. So supply chain is a big problem on that, making sure that you're, you're getting parts at the quantities you need when you need them, right? We have a three month delay, a month delay on a single part. We're not flying, right? And so I think that the biggest surprise was how different building a hardware company and a space company is than building like, you know, some AI company or software company, right? I envy them, because they can go on and online and just like, buy more servers with AWS, and now their main asset is scaled like you can't just do that in in a hardware business, right? You it takes time to build stuff. And so that is always an interesting thing compared to some of the other other startups that we spend time around. Yeah, I just did a, I just did an episode on the on the company Hadrian, who is trying to, you know, reinvent American manufacturing using a combination of legacy knowledge from those older workers that are going to be retiring soon, with automation and robotics. And they're focusing on the same industry. So aerospace, Department of Defense, these, you know, the source of the source of the product these lead times, is just something that, or the is a complaint that I've heard in that store or doing research for that story, is that it's a problem just in, just across all industries, but it appears to affect the space aerospace the most is that just a outside perception. No, I think that's like roughly correct. And the reason is that there's very few suppliers for space rated hardware like all like most space electronics as an example, have to be like this. They're different than what you would use in, like a phone or like a like a car or something like that. You can sometimes get away with automotive grade components, but you generally don't. The other thing is, because the environments are so intense, all of all of your materials, have to have like material certifications all the way back to the mind they were mined at right? So you need to be able to track everything that whole way, so you can't just go buy some like a random aluminum from Home Depot. And so Hadrian is a good example. They're a great company where, you know, they deal with a lot of that, you know, getting that metal and then machining in a very precise way such that it can be reliably work, how you intend it to work, as the designer of it. So part of the reason that that is is that the space industry, while each unit is generally very expensive, right? Each satellite could be up to a billion dollars, usually around, nowadays, around 15 to $20 million each. There's not many, like 8000s a lot of satellites. But like, 8000 cars is nothing, right? 8000 phones is nothing. 8000 aircraft even, is basically nothing. And so you're, you're just volumes are so low that, like a supplier might produce, like a like 100 valves a year, right for a satellite, or for various different satellites, and if they've, if they've sold all 100 of them, it's going to be another year until you have another 100 or so. So you're kind of just dealing with this, like low volume, high value aspect, where every single component is like that, rather than like consumer electronics, where, like, a touchscreen, is made in the millions. There's really not many things in the aerospace industry made in the millions quite yet. Are there any other, you know, sort of cool startups outside of your vertical that are doing cool things in space, or really interesting things in space? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of folks doing a lot of cool stuff, you know, everything from like, asteroid mining, which is like, you know, is like a crazy endeavor, which could turn out to be very cool, to more satellite communications, like, at a fundamental level, you have to ask the question of, like, what Is the end customer for something you're building in space, because there's a lot of people that want to build cool technology, which is great, but who's actually buying it right now? There's only two demonstrated business models that don't rely on the government, and that's internet and Earth observation. Everything else is like a one off NASA mission or something like that. Like even the International Space Station is, like, just funded by NASA. So there are companies that are starting to build, like, commercial space stations for space tourism and like that might be, that might become a big thing. But a lot of the a lot of the companies right now are just trying to innovate on the two existing verticals of internet and Earth observation or pictures. And so there's this kind of new crop of of satellite imaging companies that use synthetic aperture radar. Basically, it allows you to have, like, it's a new, a different way to take pictures. It allows you to have, like, way more fidelity in the image, as well as see through clouds and a bunch of cool stuff. And so that's starting to get we were talking about that kind of like getting 5% better, 10% better, and that wins you the market. Those are starting to get to that place where, if you're 5% you know more resolution on your pictures, or if you are if you can see through 10% more clouds, like you start to win that market. And so it's kind of interesting seeing that different stages of the of the space industry are different maturity levels where, you know, imaging is probably the most mature, then internet is probably the second most mature. So, and then we're going, which is delivery is kind of at this nascent stage that has a lot of potential, and it's kind of like ripe for the taking, where give us a sense of what the company inversion looks like. I know you're based on the West Coast. Are you doing West Coast launches? I think you said maybe Florida. What does it the team size look like? Can you kind of give us that that eagle eye view? Yeah, absolutely. So we've been around for about four years now. We are, we are about 35 people today. We're scaling up to about 100 or so in the next 12 months. We're based in, based in Los Angeles. I'm actually in our new facility, which we're really excited about. So we have one facility in Los Angeles, and we have one out in Mojave desert, where we own five acres of land. We do all of our testing. So we do, like, rocket engine testing, you know, explosion explosives testing, that kind of stuff out there. We launch and land right now out of the west coast, but eventually we'll be launching out of basically our. Launch site that people operate out of, whether that be in in the US or overseas landing right now, we'll have our first vehicle ray coming back from space in like end of January or so, with the launch coming up in the next few months. And that will be that kind of first proof point, first time we've gone to space as a company and come back. We recently got our regulatory approval to do so, so within the kind of like re entry world or launch world in space, getting FAA approval to do that is like a huge deal, like you might have seen that Space X was blocked from launching their starship rocket for, like, many weeks because the FAA was not approving them, and we're lucky enough to get that all finished up well before our launch slot. So yeah, we're scaling, we're building, and we're only flying one ray vehicle that is, again, just a very much a tech demo, just for us internally to get as much knowledge as possible and as much data as possible. And we're already kind of midway through the work on arc, which will launch for the first time in 26 that's awesome. Is there, is there any anything else that you think is important to mention that we haven't already talked about? I don't, I don't think so. I think that, like the high level of inversion is eventually you will see re entry vehicles coming down to earth, shrieking across the sky as much as you see airplanes right now. And we will think nothing of it, right? It will just be a normal occurrence. And if you look across like the millennia. Transportation modes have very much defined eras of humanity, whether it was when the first ocean going ship was built, or, you know, transcontinental railroad, or when aircraft that could fly across oceans were finally popularized. Each time, what happens is that society gets closer together, right? The world shrinks in some ways, where, you know, in 24 hours, I could be anywhere on Earth right now, but, like, what about in one hour? How does that change the world? That's what I'm most excited about. And what kind of gets us out of bed in the morning to go and build inversion? Yeah, it's definitely something that is super exciting. I mean, I know there's, you know, a lot of Doomers who who look at stuff like this, and they are almost a little scared of it, but it's, it's one of those things where it's the age of, I think, new exploration, and for our species to be able to continue to push the boundaries. I mean, there's no other places to discover on Earth except for, like, the bottoms of the ocean, and who knows if we're going to do that, but out into space is, you know, sort of that next frontier, and I find it incredibly exciting and fascinating, and really appreciate your time today and sharing your expertise and insight on building out this new shipping container in space. And so Justin for the audience. Where can they learn more about inversion? Where can they connect with you? You know, all that good stuff. Yeah, yeah. Inversionspace.com that is kind of like where we have everything, and then on Twitter, I think we're at inversion space, and I'm at JC facitti, yeah. Well, that's awesome. This was a great conversation. So thank you so much again, and hope to continue to watch inversion grow in the future. Yeah, thank you so much. It's been fantastic. I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show, sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let you all know about another company I operate, and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co worker's child, a neighbor down the street or stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place, to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, just check out the pricing page once you arrive, and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation and to. Ovid, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go jags. You.

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Blythe Brumleve

Creative entrepreneur in freight. Founder of Digital Dispatch and host of Everything is Logistics. Co-Founder at Jax Podcasters Unite. Board member of Transportation Marketing and Sales Association. Freightwaves on-air personality. Annoying Jaguars fan.

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