 And welcome back to tomorrow now before we get started with our interview with Emory I want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who helped to make this specific segment of this episode happen These are people who've contributed ten dollars or more to the specific episode. They're gonna access to our slack channel We've also got our tomorrow producers either people who've contributed five dollars or more to the This specific episode and they're gonna get access to free worldwide shipping from our swag store So thank you to everyone who contributed if you'd like to help crowdfund This is a shows of tomorrow head on over to patreon.com Slash TMRO easy for me to say all right this week. We bring on a long-time viewer and Multiple guest Emory Stagmer. He's gonna be talking about small sats Which I think is appropriate based on the number of launchers that we've been talking about and all the different Innovations that are happening in the small sat market and this is actually Emory an area that you you work in like daily Is it not? Right. Yeah, I'm a flight software engineer for satellite systems and for the last three to five years We've been talking to Internal and external customers within Northrop Grumman about making really really small satellites using the CubeSat form factor I first became aware of the CubeSats About ten years ago. There's a CubeSat conference that's held every year at Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo and I went like ten years ago and saw that the universities were doing some really interesting stuff with these super small satellites And then at the small sat conference in Utah Three years ago. We started to hear about people who were looking starting to look at this form factor for more operational units Where you could start to talk about, you know, high reliability the kinds of reliability and longevity on a system that You know, you would normally expect that of something the size of you know, maybe a refrigerator But here I've actually got a prop, you know, like props, right? This is the size of a satellite that we're talking about actually. This is a little bit bigger Wow CubeSat standard, right the CubeSat standard is 10 centimeters. This is 11 Okay, and it's 10 centimeters tall. This is 13 Because I just measured it with my, you know, handy-dandy caliper and and so this is not like the power box or the the You know the avionics or the the propellant tank. This is the whole satellite a One unit CubeSat now they make them in multiples. Okay, so they make, you know, three tall and That's a 3u CubeSat and if they make them, you know, three tall and two wide That's a 6u CubeSat, right? So we're talking about something, you know, this big And that wide Right, so you're talking about, you know, two serial boxes for an entire mission What can you do with something like that though? I mean you traditionally think of these giant satellites with huge solar arrays and huge powerful antennas Trying to shrink that into something that is smaller than a Kleenex box Seems like you have to give something up. So what utility do these CubeSats have? That's been the real interesting point is that the electronics the optics And the kinds of science instruments that you want to be able to fly Are getting smaller and smaller And it's kind of like the reverse of the of what we call the tyranny of the rocket equation Where every time something gets bigger on a rocket everything else gets bigger And then that thing gets bigger and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, right? Well the reverse of that is also true as soon as something gets smaller Everything gets smaller and then and then that gets smaller and smaller, right? So it's kind of like the reverse the smaller it gets the smaller it gets And so when you can start saying oh, I can take out the mass of the optics Or I can take out some of the mass for the electronics. Oh, well, then I don't need as much power Or I don't need as big a reaction wheels or I don't need as much propellant And so the satellites then get smaller and you start to get from You know a cubic meter satellite to a cubic foot satellite. Sorry, I'm mixing units. I know that's going to drive Jared crazy But but you get down people understand You know something this big then you get start to get down to something this big And then you start talking about well, who's making systems? Who's making electronics for these things? And what we found over the last three to five years is that There are multiple producers who are making electronics for these and unfortunately the The reliability and and the success of those missions has been significantly lacking They have a better than 50% failure rate And sometimes the missions are put it in orbit and and prove that you got it in orbit and talked to it Okay, and that mission fails, which means you never heard from it at all You know, they deployed it into orbit. You never got it back You never heard anything. So you don't know what happened Um, things like um light sail 2 for instance had a software problem And so you've got these kinds of both hardware and software failures that really limit the reliability Of these kinds of missions and generally, you know, they work for six months or a year, but they eventually You know, you're flying low cost low quality components. And so You know, you just can't have a reliability for sadly the last three five eight years with a with a predictable You know lifetime So that's where north of grumman started to take a look in the last couple of years at Well, what would it really take to Take the kinds of reliability that we've built into systems Uh for the last 20 or 30 years where we've never had an on orbit failure You know, um, I've worked on I've lost count 12 or 15 missions in the last 20 years We've never had an on orbit failure. We've never had a piece of hardware fail. We've never had a piece of software fail um And so if you can bring that kind of reliability To the cubesat environment Now you're starting to talk about being able to have a satellite that has a three to five Your reliability that only cost single-digit millions where they used to cost 100 million plus So north of grumman right now is working on taking, uh, you know, in my notes It says 24 years 30 missions of heritage of successful satellite missions But they're generally these Larger satellites, uh, that, you know fill up a good chunk of this studio space But taking that technology and compressing it down into something that's more of a cubesat size So you can actually reduce the size and cost of everything and potentially deploy a lot of these all at once instead of just one permission Yeah, absolutely And the kinds of deployers that people are are building people like planetary systems and some others Where they can bolt these things on to almost everything that's flying Including the space station the atlas five rockets the falcon nine rockets the Soyuz rockets. I mean just everything And so we're seeing we're starting to see numbers on the order of a couple of hundred satellites a year That are getting put up into low earth orbit in these cubesat form factors So a couple questions from the chat room if we could, uh, which is you talked about a greater than 50% failure rate on a lot of these cubesats What is the collision? This is from destruction 1701. What is the collision risk on these little things? Do they have is there like a keep out zone for these or is it just kind of you launch it and just hope for the best? Well, they launch them on a sequence and so the deployers will pop them off at a at a predetermined time in the launch profile So, um, they're not getting they're not interacting with each other. They're generally ejected at Some numbers of meters per second Single digit meters per second away from the rocket. So they're not they're not interacting with each other They're just either things aren't deploying or the electronics fail to operate Generally, those are always launched off And so there's a deployer pin puller inside The the the ejector That that, you know shoots these things out essentially, but it pulls a pin as it goes Right. And so when you pull that pin closes a switch And the thing turns on but if it doesn't turn on You mission over, you know, but then we still have a space debris problem with Something like that. Are these at a low enough speed and altitude where they just kind of come back After a month or two or not even that and just burn up in the atmosphere sure the the total um orbital inertia mass and is is very involved in the um, The amount of energy that the satellite has And so the smaller the satellite is the more that atmosphere and things like that will affect it And so it'll it'll come back in, you know, into the arena of the atmosphere Much earlier than a larger satellite even in the same orbit now at north of grumman You're working on more than just the software control side of it, right? It's kind of a whole package for control. Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. We're building an entire avionics system that We can use as the central You know piece of computer hardware and power systems in these super small satellites being able to bring You know the larger engineering organization and with a deep understanding of space physics and physics reliability Means that we're able to do some things that are pretty fancy The the biggest most expensive processor that you can fly in space right now is made by bae systems And it's that processor card. There's a whole card. It's got memory and everything on it But that processor card is multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and runs at 100 megahertz and has a single core processor I know that's just mind-boggling to somebody Your phone your phone has more power than that My phone has 30 times as much power than that and I don't even know how much more memory it has But that's the processor you're using to do you worked on things like lcross is that a similar processor to what you used for Going to the moon. That was the processor. Yeah, it was the processor. We used on lcross That's the processor that we built the avionics not only for lcross But also for lro lcross was essentially a copy of lro's avionics and power system Right, we basically just duplicated it and bolted it on what's called an espa ring I don't remember what that stands for. I'm sorry. It's an acronym Um But it's basically the politely known as a sewer pipe That that hooks onto the top and then we bolted boxes around the outside It's the same diameter. It's essentially the interface adapter ring that goes in between the upper stage and the primary payload So it was the adapter ring that sat in between The centaur upper stage and the lunar reconnaissance orbiter And what we did is we bolted electronics and thrusters on the outside of that ring and made a satellite out of it But it's the same electronics as as lcross. So lcross and lro both flying this rad 750 processor So what we're doing in the cubesat environment is We're taking a a new processor by a different company and we're making our own processor card We make printed wiring boards, you know, does not only design them We have a manufacturing facility at our location. We made to say that we made the avionics We made the processing cards And the power system cards that went in those boxes So we're applying that same level of understanding reliability engineering to a processor card that's this big And that thick right and so you have a processor card Then you have a mezzanine memory card and then you have a solar array module interface card And a power switching card and you can stack them up and kind of multiple You need more you need more memory. You need more power. You need more solar rays. You can add more slices But just that simple stack is three quarters of a unit of a cubesat. So it's 77.5 centimeters by 10 by 10 centimeters So one of the reasons you have very large satellites is when you're out in space You don't have a magnetosphere to help protect against radiation. So you have to protect I mean big heavy boxes to protect against radiation because Radiation whipping through a processor can can really screw it up Do you have any sort of this has comes from? Anonym, I believe is how you pronounce that in small sets. Do you use any sort of radiation protection? For hardened controllers or processors or do you use redundancy or do you have something to protect against a space based radiation? A little bit of all of that you have two different kinds of radiation that you have to worry about you have single event Upsets, which is an ionizing piece of radiation that can flip a bit in a satellite and then you have something called tid total ionizing dose and that's how long A piece of electronics essentially can survive in a given radiation environment It can soak up so much radiation and generally that's in Kilorads thousands of rads so We we start talking about having a reliable thing that'll that'll live in space and we start talking about 100 to 300 k rad the processor Some of the processors that we've used in the past are mega rad But the new The new memory systems that we are now putting on these cube sets are mega rad So you're talking about a million rads of total ionizing dose before those things will have a problem so They can survive a very long time and their tolerance to single event upsets is very very high This one comes from blue glaceous You talked about the light sail project, which is a planetary society Solar sail essentially using oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So they flew that Mentioned there was a software fault, but they was essentially successful emissions plural Other than sales, are there any propulsion systems that can send cube sets from low earth orbit to lunar orbit? Because you there's a lot of Change in velocity required for that. Oh, there's a bunch. Um, and in fact, they're they're looking at Um Both ion drives And uh, I've seen one that actually uses instead of xenon Uses iodine That one is stupendous. The iodine drive is really cool. Um, I've seen some systems that have Many hundreds of meters of change in velocity A meter per second and change in velocity. So yeah, you could actually fly these small cubes. That's um out to out to lunar Um out the geosynchronous. That's a big idea right now Like the chinese satellite that you just showed along with you guys showed in the news segment along with the uh changong 2 The little the little satellite. I mean, it's um, that's a probably they didn't really say how big it was But it's in the cubic foot range, you know multiple maybe bigger slightly bigger than a cubic foot um and um Yeah being able to to then do that kind of observation It's one of the things that a lot of the agencies are looking to do is is have these super small satellites Uh, they're less expensive. They're a little bit more expendable um They're harder to detect So for now for now So, um, you know, if you're actively broadcasting you're fairly easy to detect because you know, you're emitting RF radiation because that's how you have to talk to the ground Um, but yeah, so they're they people would like to be able to go inspect other satellites And uh, yeah, there's there's any but any agency and any commercial entity that's looking to do anything in space Uh with earth observation Science observations communications Satellite to satellite kinds of things everybody's looking at cubesats So I got two questions that kind of relate to each other. One is from uh, peco De Niro, uh, which is why aren't people trying to send a cubesat to the moon? Although I think maybe they are and the second one is from curge in seven Which is are there any plans for lagrange point cubesats? So, uh, all right So maybe people are planning on sending cubesats to the moon, but why haven't they gone there yet? Um, I think it's just a matter of you had to have a satellite that had sufficient reliability Because to get to the moon, especially with a cubesat unless you're hitchhiking on something that's already going to the moon You've got to have a lot of delta v You've got to be able to have a large change of velocity in order to get from earth orbit to lunar orbit Even to lunar flyby And so it takes a long time it takes months if you're going to use An ion drive to get that far And so you've got to have a reliability that's going to you know, not only take you months to get there But then be able to survive months once you're up there and the moon's a much more harsh radiation environment You said you're outside the magnetosphere You have a lot more um Direct cosmic rays you're in the solar wind solar wind hits Things like a solar wind hits the moon at a million miles an hour and has all kinds of ionized particles on it including protons Uh, so the moon's radiation environment is pretty harsh Uh, are there any, um Plans to take what north of grumman is doing and just allow anyone to buy it Is that kind of how that works right now? So tomorrow wants to build a cubesat and I want to use what you guys are working on Am I able to do that or is this for more government agencies? Larger customers kind of thing. No, it's pretty much any customer But what it's still a fairly expensive proposition, right? This is we're not bringing the price of cubesats down to $5,000. We're still in the $100,000 million range here if you want to buy a cubesat from an organization like ISI space or pumpkin They have a cubesat kit is is the pumpkin place to go buy cubesat systems and Cubesat shop is the place to go. So I think that's that's isi space um You're talking about being able to buy All the pieces that you need to fly a satellite for I think the number's about $65,000 for a turnkey piece of hardware Okay That's a lot lower than I thought you were going to say actually But the reliability doesn't come with flight software. You got to provide that yourself It doesn't come right provide an instrument. It does provide power and and I think that that is that price might even include Uh might even include solar rays. Um trying to remember off top of my head Um less than $100,000 However, if you really want to be able to talk about oh, I want a satellite that's going to last me Three to five years or eight years, you know, oh, I want to go to the moon or I want to go to mars Now you're talking about single-digit millions of dollars But that's still far less. So if you're going to the moon or mars, that's that's a slightly different mission profile Right, that's still far less than what we what we would ever spend on anything else that we've ever used to go to the mars By by a large percentage. Oh, yeah L cross was probably one of the cheapest missions that ever went to the moon And that mission was a hundred million dollars So you can do this for a hundred times less potentially a hundred times less using cube sets that have the capability of staying out there For quite a while Would you be able to do the same things that l cross was able to do or would you have to limit the scope of that mission? Just due to the size of the vehicle I don't know about the uh, I don't know about the optics that we actually used for the of course with l cross We had pretty good size thrusters, right because we were trying to control the centaur. So We were moving the centaur upper stage around and it weighs two tons So you've got to have a lot of propellant when you're going to do that and that starts to drive your mass Um, if I just wanted to go and take pictures Actually, you can get a pretty decent camera with uh electronics and optics That'll survive and you can put that in a 6 u cube set and you could do a pretty slick mission to the moon Man, I'm seeing a Kickstarter campaign here. Wouldn't that be cool? A crowd funded mission to the moon Grab some pictures of like an earth rise type thing That seems like it'd be all sorts of awesome and you could do it for probably a million or less not including the launcher Right, so the launcher is kind of the hard part But we have you know, we've got all these small cube set launchers coming online. We've got the electron rocket We've got launcher one from virgin galactic. They're a bunch. I there's a number actually. I think you sent me the number It's something like 30 Different launchers. I believe how many launchers were were currently in development. It's crazy Is that because there's a huge new market for these small satellites? That's uh, you know Now that we're able to make these cube sets is everyone kind of clamoring to have these lower cost satellites Is that where all of this is coming from or is this just a bit of a bubble? It's it's coming at us. It's right on the horizon coming across the horizon at us Time-wise you're talking about a year or so away Um, and you know, like I said, there's hundreds of those cubes that's flying now You know, so People want to be able to launch those things today actually the launch vehicle market the launch vehicles are actually They're actually running behind That market exists for them today Um, nasa's paying to launch things every other government agency is paying to launch things any any agency that does anything in space Is paying to launch this stuff. So Neuro pilot asks do you think the 12 you large in quotes large, uh, cube sets have more utility than several smaller cube sets It all depends on the science package, right? Um, the the size of the optics that you need to fly or um If you have to have a lot of power for things like say you wanted to fly a radar mission on a on a cube set You could potentially do that. So it's power. Um, and it's heat and its optics are really driving the size um Yeah, so it really depends on the science that you need to do Uh, Dutta actually asked from our control room are the orbits of a cube set predictable Or is there any way to adjust the orbit and or attitude now? You mentioned some drives, but they're fairly low powered So can you make course corrections with the current propulsion systems on board or is that very limited? Uh, you can make course course corrections and the thing about the cube sets is they only weigh You know one kilogram per cube set unit on on average, right? So a six u cube set is only going to weigh six kilograms Uh, which is about 14 pounds rough and dirty. So I mean you're talking about a satellite that you can pick up and hold in your Hands, I mean Nellie said that big it doesn't weigh tons. It weighs, you know You know 15 pounds Um, and so being able to move that around You know, there are stock Cubes that size propulsion systems that people are selling today That you could bolt on to the avionics in the science package that you want and be able to get a pretty significant delta v Uh, those things are commercially available Um for for both large and small changes in velocity All right, we're gonna have to break in a moment, but there was a really interesting comment that just came in Uh, something that I hadn't considered before and this comes from k. McCoy, which is um, is there any sense that maybe the cube Set framework could become the standard for even larger satellites that everything will start to be built in multiples of 10 centimeter sizes So even these huge huge satellites for say the national reconnaissance office will actually be built on a common Cube set framework and they end up being huge still But there's this common framework between all satellites that go all the way down to 10 centimeters That seem like a viable thing or by the time you get to these large Satellites are they so specialized that that doesn't make any sense? Yeah, I think when you get above About 27u which would be 30 by 30 by 30 centimeters Beyond that then you start to talk about it doesn't make sense to use those stock frameworks Although it may make sense to use the kind of avionics that we are building Our avionics system is really quite capable and we'll use the exact same flight software that we've been working on for two decades It's flown on. I don't even know how many 17 missions. I think is our our stock You know marketing pitch it's 17th generation of flight software. It already runs on this cube set architecture The other really the really really fancy thing we did our electrical engineers are some of the best anywhere And we can now Look at using power on these satellites. That's greater than 500 watts On a on a 3u cubesat Generally those things have been 10 watts to 50 watts now. We're talking about 500 and above So are you guys providing? So you're providing more than just the software and prop you you have an entire framework For the cube set then as well. I mean it sounds like right so you have power generation All's I need to do I buy your package from you and all's I need to do is put my instrument on board. It sounds like Yep, we can provide that integration for you and all the way up to you know Integrating it for you and can you provide my instrumentation as well including my optics? So if I want to just buy the whole thing from you I say make it like this and you'll you'll just sell me the whole thing or do I need to do that last step Of course Awesome Where can uh, so uh, well, normally I have people just kind of go Where can I get more information on north of grumman? Although that that's fairly simple But where can people go for more information on north of grumman and what you're doing with cubesats as well as more information on you? Because I know that you do a lot of things in the kind of the new space community Um, I'm I'm pretty uh readily available. Uh, twitter.com slash of axe headroom facebook.com slash of axe headroom my uh My you can see behind me um the various electronics and uh things that are running behind me I'm actually up in my recording studio Uh at home and so my recording studio is untied music Dot com and untied music studio on youtube as an interesting note I think you're one of the few people who has music on the moon right now If I'm right, well, yeah, I had uh, we we got to put a piece of music as a memory test pattern On uh on the processor card on the lcross mission. So Uh, yeah, if the double e proms survived, it's uh, it's on the moon I don't think they survived that that was a shattered pretty well. There's a fairly energetic event On purpose. It was a fairly energetic event, but still very cool that you were able to do that Vax always a pleasure having you on the show. Uh, for those who don't know vax also came on It did a segment on c dragon, which was an absolutely We know we need to do another one of those because it felt like you only had Time to do some of the information It would be great to do like a refresher because and compare c dragon to space x's Bfr that they announced. I think that would be a lot of fun just to kind of do size comparisons and power comparisons But that is a fascinating episode. I think that was last year if I remember right it might have been two years ago But yeah, so search for uh Tmro c dragon, you'll find it Vax as always thank you for taking time out of your saturday and coming on the show. It was fascinating and awesome Absolutely love being here