Look inside the first commercial space station | Hard Reset
- Would you run your space station on Windows 7? Well, the ISS actually does. Yikes. But the ISS needs a lot more than a software update. So we went to meet the folks at Axiom Space who are replacing it with the world's first commercial space station. But it's not just a space station, it's a space factory. Why do this? - We've been doing research on the International Space Station for 24 years.
I've done some really incredible stuff up there, but we need to take it to the next step. - Axiom Station is set to launch in the next few years, and when it does, they're going to open the door to a new era in the space economy. - I'm completely convinced that 15, 20 years from now, we're gonna be surrounded by objects that we just can't make on Earth- we can't imagine how we live without.
- Right now, we rely on countless technologies that have their origin in space, and that's before we were able to build things there. Once space factories get up and running, the potential expands exponentially. - Drugs, alloys, and 3D-printed organs, and those options were manufactured in space using microgravity. - But to become the first commercial space station, they've had to completely rethink everything about how we live in space. - The speed at which we're building things- to go from idea on a napkin to building prototypes to space flight hardware in a very short time is really remarkable. And of course, don't be afraid to blow things up once in a while.
- Will you be able to visit or work in space in your lifetime? Stick around and find out. This is "Hard Reset." A series about rebuilding our world from scratch. When Fry's Electronics suddenly closed all their stores in 2021, it felt a little like the end of the world. - You got Best Buy still, but so it's not the same.
- If you never went to one, they were amazing electronic stores, but they also had amazing themes for each store, like a casino or an Aztec temple or space. - We'd drive by and go, "You know, that'd be cool to get the old Fry's building." And then we'd go, "Ah, that's crazy, that's a crazy idea." - That's Matt Ondler: the President of Axiom Space, and he was wrong. It wasn't such a crazy idea.
That's right- here at the Old Space Station-themed Fry's Electronics store next to NASA's Johnson Space Center is where Axiom Space is developing a real space station to replace the ISS. - Mr. Fry, who still owns the building, said, "I'll lease it to you, but you can't remove the mockups." We said, "Okay, no problem." - Yeah, why would you ever wanna remove the mockups anyway? - This is our space station development facility.
This where we do all the design and development of the systems required to support a crew in space. So basically our space station is being born here. - It's sort of interesting to have the ISS hanging over your head as you're designing a system to replace it. - That's right. A little bit of inspiration. - This is Dr. Michael Baine,
the CTO of Axiom Space. He's gonna show us how to design a space station. - So this is a full-scale mockup, and this is designed to help us understand how to do the assembly. Basically a four-and-a-half-meters diameter, a little over 10-meters-long. So it is a robotic spacecraft that has propulsion, guidance, navigation, and control, and everything needed to actually get to ISS so that the ISS crew could capture it and convert it to ISS. - Is this of the final station? So that's this.
- That's right. - So I guess the big question I have when I see a Knex model is could you not afford Legos? Axiom's approach might seem a little scrappy; even the facility itself is an abandoned retail store. They use plywood and foam prototypes, but these unassuming ingredients are coming together to make something really amazing.
- If you built a lot of prototypes and failed quickly, in the end, you would've spent a lot less money because you're failing on Home Depot hardware. - This is how you bring a fail-fast approach to space. - We do four-week sprints. Every four weeks, we're building something, testing something, blowing something up.
- So mockups like this look really grungy, but they're actually very important because we could reconfigure them. It's where our crew members come in and actually run through a procedure. So we were constantly reevaluating how we lay things out based on crew feedback. - These mockups allow experienced astronauts to test out the designs they'll be relying on in space- like this prototype for the crew quarters in Axiom Station.
It's about the same size as an apartment in San Francisco. It doesn't feel actually, I mean, it's small. - This is about 20% more volume. So they're bigger than what's on orbit today. - Oh, that's very interesting. - So we had a little bit more freedom for how we laid it out.
And of course we have a window where they don't have a window in their crew quarters. That was a big thing that we wanted to have for our crew experience perspective. And of course, you're not seeing any of the soft goods treatments that you would have on there. - It would be weird if you sent them to space with unfinished plywood. - With wood paneling.
- Oddly enough, the first thing Axiom sent into space wasn't a space station. It was people. They've already run three private missions to the ISS, which has opened up access to smaller countries. It's also allowed them to work with experienced astronauts who seem, well, pretty happy to get back into orbit.
- And we all know gravity sucks. It's been part of my goal to try and educate these engineers on what it is like to actually live in space. I'm Peggy Whitson, I have more time in space than any other American at 675 days, and I was the first female Commander of the International Space Station. As I walk around and see the new modules that we're designing of how we want our crews to live in space, we're not doing just the same thing over again.
We wanna build in that adaptability to continue that innovation as we maintain our presence in space. - This is more like the early days of NASA in the '60s. The urgency of racing the Soviets pushed NASA to develop things way more quickly.
- But our real innovation is the ability to look at a problem and to explore different solutions. - One new technology developed here is the part of the life support system that pulls moisture out of the air for recycling. - We look to see what was done on ISS, vendor gave us a quote for $14 million worth of hardware just to remove the humidity out of the air. - In this situation, NASA might have written a check, but the engineers at Axiom came up with a totally new solution.
- We now have a device that is 3D printed. It has virtually no moving parts, and it's 99.8% water capture. All in, the thing can't possibly cost more than $100,000, and it's technically superior in every way. That's just one example of creating a culture where you want people to experiment, you allow them to fail, you allow them to explore ideas, and it can lead to the ability for a commercial entity to build something that's pretty hard and remarkable. - Axiom Station will start as habitation modules attached to the ISS. Then they'll add a module for research and manufacturing, an observatory, and a module to provide power, thermal, and airlock systems.
At this point, the ISS will go for a swim. Yep, they're literally gonna crash it into the Pacific Ocean. Hopefully that will be the most dramatic crash that Windows 7 is ever involved in. Anyway, what you have then is the Earth's first commercial space station; something unthinkable just a few years ago.
Designing a space station is hard, but the problems might not be what you expect. - The engineers had some just beautifully designed handrails, but I'm like, I wouldn't wanna clean that. Get a disinfectant wipe in all those little holes, no, beauty is great, but not when it's gonna cost me a lot of cleaning time. - There's a balance to be struck here between something practical and something aesthetically pleasing because aesthetics do matter as well. - If you look at a picture of the International Space Station, it looks like a crazy person's garage- there's just stuff everywhere.
- What's that supposed to mean? - So we really paid attention to have a cleaner aesthetic. We paid more attention to organization and stowage, so the crew's spending less time looking for things. - What they found with ISS is things were always getting lost. The crews spent an enormous amount of time trying to find stuff. This is where all of the patches to other parts of our station will connect.
We're experimenting with cameras and RFID to basically do inventory management as things come in and out of each of the modules, things like that. - How fascinating. - There's thousands of tools that are required to maintain the ISS. Our mantra is that we ought to be able to assemble and disassemble the entire station with five tools. Now five tools is too few, but if you start there, you end up with a hundred tools or a thousand tools versus 10,000 tools. - And that's pretty important when you have to fix things in a jam.
Because repairs aren't as easy as they look in a Michael Bay movie. - I don't wanna stay here anymore! Yeah, finally! - All these learnings from the ISS and to focus on making it a comfortable, easy-to-use Space Station, are in service of the larger goal of using it as a platform for manufacturing in microgravity. - Currently, a company can go to the ISS and do research and do fundamental manufacturing, but NASA's not allowed to then allow that company to make a thousand of them or a million of them. - But with Axiom Station, all that research that's been done on the ISS can start to become a reality on Earth. Things like pharmaceuticals could be first, namely cancer-fighting therapies. - Why would we grow cancer cells in orbit? They grow faster.
So if you can develop a drug or a therapy that inhibits their growth in space, you know it's gonna inhibit their growth even better here on Earth. - Alloys can be made stronger in microgravity because the alloys, molecules, and atoms align the way they want to; they're not affected by gravity. The other thing that I think is really cool is the ability to 3D print organs. - Using microgravity as a platform for manufacturing is actually closer than you might think.
We might be able to develop corneal lenses because we can make perfect lenses. And then you might one day have surgery to have a space-grown lens on your eye. - There might be a future in which you need a heart transplant, you send your DNA up to a space station, machine up there prints your heart, and then that heart's returned for the transplant. - We're entering a new era of space exploration.
Between commercial space stations and the new Artemis base on the Moon, people of all nationalities and genders will soon be doing work in space. - And one of the things that we're already doing is we're opening up space to countries that haven't been there before. We flew two Saudi Arabian astronauts, including a woman. We also flew the first Turkish astronaut.
- Right now, space is accessible to more people than it ever has been before, which means we also need to rethink the space suit. - So a space suit is very much a mini spacecraft. It has its own life support systems, own power system. - So, our engineers have taken a lot of the research that was done by NASA and we've taken that and tried to reduce the footprint, tried to reduce the hard torso constraints, which allows you to get your hands together. Everything is much closer and you don't feel like Tyrannosaurus Rex with short arms doing everything. - The existing NASA space suit has problems.
It was designed for a very narrow range of human bodies, mainly male bodies. - Part of it was a decision based on money and who was doing the spacewalks at the time, which were guys, it requires a lot of strength and adaptability to overcome suits that don't fit. I am very proud of the fact that I was able to help train some women that I didn't know if they were even big enough to be able to do space walks. - The current NASA space suit is also really difficult to move in, and that actually makes it quite dangerous.
- You've probably seen some of the lunar shots where the guys were bouncing around on the Moon. - 'I like to skip along.' - Their limited mobility in the suit caused them to have to do unusual motions.
So sometimes they fell down. - 'No, daggone it.' - 'Would you go over and help Twinkle Toes, please?' - It's also incredibly hard on the crew.
Lots of crew injuries using the current suit. - Axiom Space hopes to make it a much more adaptable suit to be more inclusive to all people. - The Axiom suit is the most advanced space suit ever, and it's handmade by an amazing group of people who've worked on projects as diverse as costumes for "Star Trek" or outfits for Cirque de Soleil.
- And the suit is really like wearing clothes. There's different size arms, there's different size legs, different size boots that they can wear so that we don't have to have custom suits for everybody that wears them. All the guys that get in the suit are engineers and they're designers of the suit. So it's one of my opinion, you can't design a suit you can't get into and feel, right? And if you look at one of the difference between us and the Apollo suits, the Apollo suits did not have that mobility.
So he has bearings at his shoulders, at his arms, at his hips, and legs to allow him to walk and allow him to squat and do more nude body movements. - So Richard, I'm curious for you, like how does it feel to move around in this when you're walking around doing things like? - At first it took a little bit to get used to, learning exactly how the bearings will rotate, but once you get a couple of runs in, you start to understand how the suit moves, the best way to operate it, least effort. - How fast can you move in it? Like if you, God forbid, found a space monster on the Moon, how quickly could you get away? - I haven't tested that yet. We have a treadmill kind of set up for that later on maybe. - Not outrun a gazelle, but maybe a bear? - Faster than the other astronauts. - Space bears maybe.
- Space bears maybe. - Richard declined to test out this theory. Anyway. We cover a lot of really amazing startups and companies at Hard Reset, just like Axiom Space. And one thing they all have in common is that they rely on software to keep their operations running.
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The plan is for a station and a suit that will allow more people from around the globe to exist comfortably in space. And of course, enjoy the view. - The Earth observatory is the closest thing to a spacewalk that you can get. - And so I'm gonna be looking up and I'm gonna see the Earth passing below me at incredible speed.
- 17,500 miles per hour. - You cover the entire earth in orbit within like about 45 minutes? - So day night is 45. So 90 minutes in orbit.
So you'll see a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes. - Wow. - Space has always also been this place where we can explore and cooperate as countries. If we can bring more people in the world interested in exploring, we can bring more countries together, we can get more people that are in orbit. And they look down on the Earth and they see that Paraguay is not pink and Brazil yellow and Uruguay green, that it's all one country, I think it'll be better for all of us. - So, picture a scenario where we can print organs in space and deliver them to save lives on earth, or manufacture complex molecules that can fight cancer, or make carbon nanotubes that could revolutionize materials.
- There is a future economy in space in which there really is things that we can make that we just can't make on Earth that will change the world, and make life better for everyone. And suddenly we're building giant factories in space to leverage that microgravity. - A station like this will allow human creativity to really flourish in space, and there's no predicting what that will lead to. - I think the commercialization of space is gonna offer incredible opportunities in the future for our young people to be able to access space on a more regular basis. Recognize that space is a destination now, too.
There might be a place for you to work in space as well as there is on Earth. - There'll be people that are kind of like offshore and they'll go into orbit every 30 days on and 30 days off doing manufacturing things and maintenance. And then at some point in the future then, it's cities in space in which there might be one person that's working there, but their family's there with them. - All of this will give us the foundation we need to begin colonizing other worlds.
And the further we explore, the more we change the way we think about what our home really is. - Growing up on a farm in Iowa and my world was that farm, and then you go to college and it expands to being my state. You leave the country and it's the whole United States when you come home. And then when you come home from space, it's Earth. Someday, it'll be our solar system.
2024-07-15 01:04
