The evolution of multi-mission orbital vehicles

Time Markers

00:00 – Episode introduction
00:42 – Topic introduction
01:38 – Colonel Owen Stephens opening remarks
03:38 – Seth Lacy opening remarks
05:40 – Michael Creech opening remarks
06:48 – Israel Figueroa opening remarks
07:57 – Question: What other capabilities/technologies are needed beyond maneuverability
08:20 – Colonel Owen Stephens response
11:22 Seth Lacy response
14:20 – Michael Creech response
15:44 – Israel Figueroa response
17:06 – Colonel Owen Stephens response
20:19 – Question: On implementing capabilities
21:02 – Colonel Owen Stephens response
25:35 – Seth Lacy response
28:15 – Michael Creech response
30:13 – Israel Figueroa response
33:33 – Audience question: What support or funding will Space RCO and AFRL be able to commit to the PY26.1 STRATFI that just opened
34:06 – Seth Lacy response
36:12 – Colonel Owen Stephens response
40:28 – Audience question: How are multi-mission vehicles impacted by launch capabilities?
40:44 – Michael Creech response
41:49 – Follow up – On delta V and launch opportunities?
42:21 – Michael Creech response
42:55 – Israel Figueroa response
44:23 – Question: What’s the biggest thing that can happen in, say, the next 12 months to help enable multi-mission orbital vehicles
44:47 – Israel Figueroa response
45:40 – Michael Creech response
46:04 – Seth Lacy response
46:41 – Colonel Owen Stephens response

Transcript – Evolution of Multi-Mission Orbital Vehicles Panel Conversation

Jeff Foust – Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. As Austin said, I’m Jeff Foust. I’m filling in for a colleague, David Ariosto, who unfortunately had some last minute travel changes and could not moderate this panel as planned. You can think of me as the utility infielder who is sitting on the bench all game and gets called up in the late innings as a defensive replacement to fill in for this panel. But as you see here, we are talking about the evolution of multi-mission orbital vehicles. We have a great panel from government and industry, and rather than droning on to their bios that you could read anyway in the app, I’m going to ask each of them to briefly introduce themselves their roles, and also just to make sure that we’re all on the same page, both on the stage and in the audience, what they’re thinking of when we talk about multi-mission orbital vehicles. So colonel, I’ll start with you.

Colonel Owen Stephens – Thank you. Hi, I’m Owen Stephens. I’m the dual headed as the director of contracting and the Small Business Director for the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. And we’re a very small acquisition organization, one of three in the Space Force, SSC, SDA, US located in Albuquerque, and our particular mission set is is concerned with acquiring things that help the Space Force with space control, and so I think generally that means that a multi-mission orbital vehicle may seem like a different thing to us than it might mean to space mobility and logistics or others.

What we what we are interested in, is a flexible vehicle that can do more than one thing, whether that’s see the world around it, do other effects, and perhaps communicate in a meaningful at a meaningful data rate, and so on and so forth. And so we’ve been hopeful and in some cases encouraging, sometimes with money the industry space to get to a place where they can build a thing that we find technically appealing, and it wouldn’t be part of our mission space by like a servicing and manufacturing orbital vehicle doesn’t mean we don’t want one, right? We’d love to have that as a service available to us if it ends up flourishing. Probably enough on that, and I will turn it over to Seth.

Seth Lacy – That was a great intro. I’m Seth Lacey. I work for the Air Force Research Laboratory a couple of buildings down the road from Colonel Stephens. The Air Force futures laboratory. We’re charged with the awesome responsibility of building the tech to help make the acquisition organizations like space RCO, you know, wildly successful. So it’s a, it’s a terrific mission. So we’re, you know, we’re really glad to be able. Blessed be able to do that. I’m the space mobility and precision maneuver senior scientist at AFRL that covers everything from how do you get things into space in the first place? So space access, things been getting much better in recent years, but we still have a long way to go to get to where we want to be, as well as the mobility and maneuver aspects of in space, mobility and maneuver. And you know, we’re working on a bunch of the enabling technologies to help make overall propulsive capabilities high delta V spacecraft. We’re working on refueling technologies development to enable refueling for future systems and a whole bunch of other enabling tech. There lots of really cool things to go to go.

Colonel Owen Stephens – Do you know I was expecting a round of applause when you said high delta V, and it just, it just didn’t happen.

Seth Lacy – You know, I’ll talk more about that. We, we don’t even use the right units today. So we talk about, you know, this many meters per second of capability in a spacecraft. And we really need to be talking in kilometers per second. We’re so we’re, we’re just not in the right headspace to really get after the mobility that we really need to have. But we’re, we’re working on it. We’re getting there.

Michael Creech – Thanks, Seth, so I’m Mike Creech from Firefly Aerospace, so we’re starting on the industry side of things, where we do launch vehicles, both small, medium, lunar landers, and then spacecraft. And so for Firefly, I’m the VP of strategy and business development, kind of like when I look at multi-mission orbital vehicles, and like, look at where we’re looking at in terms of spacecraft. Just in general, Firefly is looking at enabling access to space for everyone, anywhere. And so we’re looking at, really the space maneuver vehicle type of approach. So Colonel Stephens and Seth were talking about high delta v, that is absolutely where we’re going on our satellites, to be able to enable maneuver within orbits, across orbits, and to enable different types of missions than some of the more classical kind of sedentary Earth fixed satellites, whether that’s orbital, transfer, on orbit, servicing or just general moving about orbits to enable different types of missions, and working with both the government on the DoD side, Civil and in commercial, just across the entire spectrum.

Israel Figueroa – And good afternoon, everyone. I’m Israel Figueroa, better known as Fig, also with Firefly Aerospace, and we have a perspective. I’m a retired Air Force officer, and I have a national security perspective. I see as multi-mission orbital vehicles as a an enabler for national defense that we’re not relying on these monolithic satellites that are just sitting around there, large satellites that don’t have any mobility, and they’ve become big target. Big targets. Envision a world in the future where you have spacecraft that can carry in multiple missions, but they’re mobile enough to and agile enough to to execute a wide variety of missions. That could be RPO, could be an SDA mission. It could be some kind of advanced comms or or even in the future, do some kind of offensive maneuver in space, but, but that’s, that’s the future that I see, and companies like Firefly and Electra spacecraft, that’s where we’re looking. We’re seeing, we see that future developing where we can support with our agile spacecraft or national defense customers that need that kind of ability.

Jeff Foust – All right, so clearly, one thing that emerged from that is that the the importance of of multi-mission orbital vehicles is the the high delta V capability, the high maneuverability, kilometers per second rather than meters per second. What other aspects set a multi-mission orbital vehicle apart? What other technologies or capabilities beyond that maneuverability? Do they do such spacecraft need to carry out these missions?

Colonel Owen Stephens – So it depends on the mission, right? My mission, what the space RCO would be interested in, is distinctly different than what assured access to spaces. Mission interest areas lie or space mobility and logistics, or whomever, fill in the blank and actually the answer when you if you unpack the question, it’s actually a very, very complex question. So, for example, absolutely love high delta V space. Co likes high delta V and, but we like nimbleness as well and rapid acceleration, if you will. You’re not going to get that with a thing that gives you good gas mileage with, which is EP, right? And, and so then, so then you’re going to burn through your available delta V or available propellant reasonably fast and then be off mission. Or they look at things like hybrid capability, so electrical propulsion for good gas mileage, start talking in terms of kilometers rather than meters, with the ability to move quickly when you need to move quickly and and then you when you further unpack that, if we can buy the things We want at reasonable prices, rather than exorbitantly high prices, then you start to introduce proliferation to the conversation.

And when you introduce that, then you can start relaxing your delta V requirements, perhaps because you have more coverage the I think for us, though, at the moment, high delta V, yes, important. Another very important thing for us, though, is for our satellites to be able to sense the world around them. And I’m not talking about space domain awareness for the purpose of space domain awareness as somebody else’s mission set. I’m talking about more, we’ll say tactical awareness. And so that’s a thing we care about. Can it see across the spectrum, visible light, perhaps IR, perhaps RF, multi phenomenology? Can it see the world around it. And then further, can it understand the world around it, and and, and then communicate that awareness. And so you can just keep unpacking it, probably enough for me, and I’ll pass the mic metaphorically,

Seth Lacy – I think there’s a an element of time that feels feels differently for Department of Defense missions than it does for civil space and commercial space and and I know that, you know, we had our commercial partners. No no time. Time feels, you know, like a resource to us as well. You know, we’re we’re not selling service if we’re not on station where we need to be, we’re not making money if we’re not where we need to be when we need to be there. That, I think that’s true. I still think that department fence has a a qualitatively different understanding of time, and that means that we need to get where we want to be quickly. Efficiency can be a secondary concern in a lot of missions, a lot of missions, you know, you know, either you get there quickly or it doesn’t matter.

So we’re, you know that the hybrid propulsion systems are really important. For that. Our ability to field new kit is pretty slow. Space RCO is pretty fast, one of our faster gazelles, but compared to using the systems you already have in space. The best spacecraft in the world is the one you have. Can you use it to do the mission that you need to do? Can you build a spacecraft can be flexible enough that it can accommodate a different mission today than it had yesterday? If we can get to something like that, then replenishment, isn’t I decide I need a new capability. I start working on requirements. I, you know, start thinking about standing up, maybe a new PEO. I start standing up, you know, a funding line, contracts, launch ground testing, developmental tests on orbit, operational tests on orbit, training of crews. That’s, that’s, that’s a long process, kind of a bad way to get where you’re going. If you already have one in space, and you already and it’s already full of gas, and you already have crews know how to fly it, and you already have a c2 system for it, and you’ve got a ground system, and you have mission planning tools. You know how it fits into the multi domain fight? That’s that’s a really good answer. So what can we do with the kit we have? And how can we build future kit that can be adapted to new mission? And this is true. You know, at the individual spacecraft level, you. Uh, but we’re really, we’re blessed to be at the beginning, the early infancy, of a new service, and we’re trying to stand up this new organization that can be that flexible, adaptive, creative force, that that that we need to be.

Michael Creech – I definitely like that, and I resonate with all of it to take, kind of like a different thread of like the same topic about, like, multi-mission vehicles. I think there are kind of two different ways to view it is like Firefly looks to build a platform or suite of platforms to serve different missions. Is it’s, can you have a platform that a standardized platform, or somewhat standardized platform that can serve multiple missions, and can you do multiple missions on a single platform? So I certainly think the multiple missions on a single platform very much aligned with what Colonel Stephens and Seth are talking about. But we look at like broadland, how do we get down to the affordability that you guys are looking for, how do we get down to schedule times that you guys would want or need? That’s really looking at, how can we build a platform that’s able to survey, seeing different missions on its own with minimal adjustment? So, you know, I’m really interested in modularity, scalability, and I think one of the things that’s kind of come up recently that we’re still trying to figure out, is interoperability. Is interoperability, is really can build these platforms and how it plugs into various missions, so that we can provide you guys come with a mission or mission set payload suite, we can integrate it on with minimal NRE at a very affordable, low cost, quick schedule, and be able to do that. So I think that’s kind of an angle I would take with a multi-mission vehicle.

Israel Figueroa – A lot of great points. I agree with Michael, and a lot of the stuff that he’s that he’s saying, and with the rest of the panel, I will add with one more thing, because I think a lot of the technologies that we need to enable the missions are already there. It’s just they’re not. We just need to put them together and scale them up. So I think there’s three things. So this is a modular module boss that can support multiple missions. There’s the affordable price at an affordable price, and then the third part is the being able to produce it quickly, and so being able to manufacture it and produce many of them, and have a we envision a future to really to keep the cost down and enable a future where these things are proliferated at affordable prices. You need open and hot production lines that are always going and you’re not making a science project. Every time you have a new mission that comes to you, you have a a design that is modular enough. And you’re you’re building busses at an affordable price point. And then you, you know the government, whoever you know, always think about national security. Our customers will come and buy the bus and then marry that up with the mission that they need to accomplish.

Colonel Owen Stephens – I’m gonna piggyback, but actually I can piggyback on both y’all because you kind of kept the theme going there. You raise a really important point that’s worth talking about from the government perspective. So if I asked myself or one of the engineers that works in our organization, or got some help from AFRL, and say, write me down what you want.

Seth Lacy – Never as easy as it sounds.

Colonel Owen Stephens – No, and invariably, what we end up writing down, one will have question marks through there where we’re like, well, we just know we want some we don’t know exactly what it looks like, but we’ll figure that out as we go along. But generally, you will also end up with things that do not conform to the idea of modularity, do not conform to the idea of producibility, and so you end up the government does this over and over again. We write a requirement that is entirely technically unfeasible at this point in time, certainly cannot be met by any existing product line, and then we pay somebody a billion dollars to spend 10 years making it come true poorly. That is what we do. We need to stop doing that. Industry needs to help us stop doing that by telling us when we’re being that way, because we’ve spent so many years behaving that way that it’s becoming ingrained in the national psyche.

And instead, what should be happening is the government should very carefully review what’s going on in industry, and then the government should, to the maximum extent practicable, conform its requirements to the existing ecosystem, rather than trying to make the existing ecosystem conform to its requirements. That is how you are rapid. That is how you enable modularity. That is how you enable hot production lines. And then you move slowly if you still have a need that you feel like could be met better. You move slowly outside of your hotline to mature said thing until it’s available for prime time, working with AFRL and Diu and others. But the fastest way to run a program is to turn is to put basic science into the program and have it have to fulfill the maturation of basic science and do a program that is a guaranteed path to a really long time and a lot of money. So those things are absolutely important. What I’m suggesting is we have to have behavior change, right? We have to if we actually want to see that future come true.

Jeff Foust – Great. I’ll remind folks, you see the QR code up on the screen or on your tables. You’ve been here long, if you know how it works, send in those questions. Are Already some great questions coming in that we’re going to get to in a little bit. But to build on on this point, I had been thinking of, what are the enabling technologies for multi-mission orbital vehicles. But I’m thinking that maybe it’s not so much the enabling technologies, but mindsets or contracting approaches or things like that to make these a reality. So I will throw that out there. Are there key technologies that need to be developed, or is it a matter of taking technologies we have now and implementing them in a new way to enable these capabilities.

Colonel Owen Stephens – There’s a lot of technologies that are necessary for success, and he would do much better at a little bit of this, but I’ll just touch on a few. So for example, if you want to talk about servicing, right? So if you start talking about servicing, that means you need to drive up and kiss the satellite that you are wanting to service, gently kiss the satellite you are wanting to service. And so you need to have very good, finite control over your ability to maneuver so and then you need to have the software backing that so that it does it well. You need it to be automated. So there’s all those algorithms. You need to have good cameras that can resolve the imagery so that you can see what you’re doing. And then you need the right software, computer vision, machine vision, to stitch all that together to enable a satellite to make smart decisions in the moments that are available to it, to make those decisions.

And I just described a singular ish thing, right? And you can unpack it for propulsion. You can unpack it for you can unpack it for a whole lot of stuff. It’s a very complex problem, but interestingly, there’s a lot of overlap. So if you, if you pick a company that wants to do orbital servicing, I won’t name any in this forum, but a few leap to mime, they have to solve a number of technical challenges in order to do that, and those are then turned into capabilities that might have more far reaching ramifications than just orbital servicing. And so the rising water floats all ships higher. And and so I lost the second half of your question. What was the second half?

Jeff Foust – It was not just enabling technologies, but there are changes in mindsets.

Colonel Owen Stephens – Yeah, contracting process, yeah, all right, so I know we’re going through far reform right now. Who’s tracking that far reform. Yay. Didn’t get a round of applause. I sat in a room when I was a few years ago, and I was listening to another round of acquisition reform spiel. And the gentleman that was sitting next to me, I turned to him, and I said, Hey Andy, if you close your eyes, isn’t it like you’re a lieutenant again. The reality is, I don’t need any more tools. I would suggest that I have all of the tools I need. They. Are available to me. I have any, any number of contracts, types, OTAs, fixed price, cost plus, like, a full spectrum of tools available to me. What I actually need is the until intelligence and critical thinking that allow me to choose the right tool for the moment in time that I find myself in that is, I think the problem if we choose a fixed price to develop something very technically hard.

Guess how that’s going to go. We all know how that’s going to go. Anybody say a 12? We all know the ramifications of that. If I choose a cost plus to do business on a thing that should be technically understood well enough that it lends itself to fixed price, and I do that with certain companies, I’m going to get cost overruns, even though it doesn’t really make sense that that would happen, and I’m going to get schedule delays. And so I don’t think we need any more tools, not sure we even need to change the way everything is written. What I do think is that we and industry together need to get better at choosing the right relationship as codified in the paper that we put in place, because I think that’s a thing that we haven’t gotten right often enough. All right there.

Seth Lacy – That’s a pretty good thread I was thinking on the sort of interfaces and standards. I think there’s a so I don’t want to give anyone the impression that, you know, the Department of Defense wants to get in the business of maintaining standards. There are examples where we do that, but it’s rare, and it should be rare. No one like we’re we have a really hard like we’ve, we’ve tried it many times, and it’s really hard on the Department of Defense to maintain a standard, to build it like standards take a ton of work, and it takes a ton of maintenance. It’s not like you write it down and walk away. It’s really hard to do. Developing standards is something that we can help do.

So we can help encourage different pieces of industry to do the technology development, testing, validation, flying in space of different standards. I’m thinking of refueling as one example where and there’s going to be a family of standards that are going to be, you know, I think again, refueling. They’re going to be relevant for a long time. I don’t think there’s going to be one single standard for refueling. The thing that you use to, you know, refuel your your Toyota Corolla is not the same thing that refuels an F 16, which is, you know, these are, these are not the same interfaces, and they shouldn’t be. The fuels are different. The mission is different. Everything like so, okay, there’s more. They’re going to be a family of standards running around forever.

We want to help industry mature those standards faster and get them validated and tested in space and proliferated so that we can leverage those and use those getting to the point where we have vehicles that can refuel each other or perform other servicing activities, gets us closer to that. I needed to go do a new mission tomorrow. Okay, it’s no problem. I have vehicles in space today that are more or less the right thing that can do that. I need to do some reconfiguration or software or wave forms or something great. I can perform those modifications from the safety and comfort of my own home and have my space vehicle ready to go tomorrow. And my crews are good, and they know what they’re they know how to do it. That’s terrific, as opposed to writing in a new set of requirements to go build a new, unique, bespoke, perfect thing that takes forever and costs fortunes,

Michael Creech – Absolutely, I think in terms of technology, I certainly agree with what had been mentioned in Firefly, are very heavy on the propulsion side. So certainly that’s something that we’re putting a lot into in propulsion, like when I think of like multi-mission platforms, where the two things that kind of keep me up at night, and as we look at various mission sets and connection is onboard processing, because we’re looking to see more and more onboard data processing to help alleviate com channels and to reduce latency from sensing to action, and then also networking. I think as we’re looking to integrate different systems, different constellation, different missions together, there’s a huge networking challenge that kind of I still haven’t tried to crack that net yet on. How, how to go through.

So there’s kind of like two of the enabling technologies that I’m certainly looking at and concerned about how we can do that and move forward. I think one of the things Seth that kind of teased out the last part you mentioned is it sounds like kind of on orbit reconfigurability, on orbit software updates and changes. So that way, you know, when you have a new need, come on, you have the ability to update an existing system, to do a new mission, or to do some tangential so that was something I actually hadn’t really had the front of my mind till just now. So I really appreciate that. And then just in terms of you mentioned contractual and mindset, I think from our perspective at Firefly, like we’re, we very much like commercial FFP contracting, and like we were, we’re ready to lock stock, ready to go on that. And I know I’ve worked at some of the more traditional defense companies, I know that that can be concerning from a business risk perspective, but I think some of the newer kind of smaller companies, new entrants, new technology companies seem to be much more open to taking on FFP type contracting, and I think that helps potentially move faster and get where we want to go. And then it certainly helps with affordability, I think, as well.

Israel Figueroa – So I know Colonel Stephens is a contracting officer, and I’m a former program manager in the Air Force, former acquisitions officer, so I think in terms of contracts as well. And then, to his point, the program managers have to have understanding of the tools that they have in the tool set so they can leverage those tools. And it’s also a mindset that, you know, in the past, we used to do this big with every time the deal, they wanted to do something really hard, they put in a lot of money in this cost plus contract. And you know that you essentially, you get married to this contractor, and it tends to end up being a really, really expensive program. And eventually you’ll make it you’re successful. But if you flip that around and then turn it into a number of smaller fixed price contracts, and the one example that always comes to mind is the commercial lunar payload services clips that NASA is doing, they basically spread out the risk and their budget across a number of vendors, and to do something really hard, they needed to take experiments to the surface of the moon and operate those experiments on the surface of the moon.

That is really hard. And you, if you’re, if you’ve done any work on the government, imagine if they were going to do, go the legacy way and try to do that, build that lander on a cost plus contract. We’re talking about a billion dollar plus contract, and because they were able to award it to multiple contractors, you have some of them that are being successful. Like Firefly in March became the first ever commercial company to land successfully and operate on the surface of the moon, and that contract really changed the trajectory of Firefly. Firefly is not what it is today, if you don’t have those kind of opportunities out there. And I have not seen an equivalent to that on the mobility side, on the where, because the government say, Yeah, I want to buy services. And I’m not saying the panel is here, but and we have heard that we’re going to buy these services. Those services are not there today. But if you, if you do an investment and and fund, you know, put a put together, like an IDIQ within some, some kind of Ota contract, where you spread the your funding across multiple companies to go demonstrate those technologies.

Eventually you will have an ecosystem of companies that have proven technologies. And you did it for a fraction of the cost. Our lunar mission cost about $100 million that excluded the launch. That’s unheard of being able to do that. You did something incredibly hard, put a land there on the surface of the moon. The entire thing costs about $100 million you can do that by going the traditional way of thinking. So, so that that’s, that’s what I challenge the group. And I tell these to the government folks, when I talk to them, yeah, think about if you have a billion dollar in budget, put that money across to do a give the opportunity to multiple companies and fixed price contracts and see what they deliver. They can deliver for you. Some of them will be successful. Some of them will not. But at the end, you will have, you will have multiple, show multiple companies that can, they can deliver those services for you.

Jeff Foust – All right, great. I want to turn to some audience questions. We’ve got some good questions coming in. I’m going to start with the one that’s the most popular. It’s also a particularly specific question, what support or funding will space RCO and AFRL be able to commit to the PY26.1 STRATFI That just opened.

Seth Lacy – I can go first. Yeah, AFRL is not where they keep the money. So we do have core funds, and we guard those funds very preciously …

Colonel Owen Stephens – … and you do specific things with them…

Seth Lacy – … and we specific customers for specific so if one is so AFRL services, you know, what are the space technology needs across the air for Space Force, I work on the space side. If one of our customers, space RCO or another SPO or SPO Space Command says they would really want a new technology that moves the needle for us and helps helps prioritize what we do. We We do a lot of work in partnerships. So we partner with industry, with other government organizations. Say that the downside to doing partnerships is anytime you do something with somebody else, like Relationships are hard and okay, like getting the partnership set up, and then everybody understanding what we’re doing together, and there are going to be issues along the way.

Okay, all that is hard. On the bright side, AFRL, we’re graded on technology transition. That is the only thing. That is the only metric that matters. When people say, What did AFRL do for me today is, okay. What technology did you transition out to the warfighter? And if we do our, you know, our larger projects in partnerships, that really builds in the path we’re working with an acquisition organization or requirements organization all the way through then that, you know that transition of that technology is is more assured because we understand the need, because we’re doing it together all the way through. But we are looking forward to anyone in the audience who might be putting together some some projects for the for the upcoming back by STRATFI window.

Colonel Owen Stephens – Okay, you gave me a lot of good time. Over to you, sir, over to me. All right. Here is here are two interesting things about the space RCO. One interesting thing, we tend to not support things in the public sphere for a variety of reasons, which means that the occasions where we would actually like put a space RCO signature on a tag, STRATFI five server face to fill in the blank are Few. It does happen, but they’re few. The reason is, we don’t necessarily want to telegraph things that we’re interested in. So one of the things you might see us do is is non publicly support something like going, and I think we’ve done this, you and I have done this where I go, Hey, I’m really interested in this. Can you please sign on as a tpoc you have your organization has done that for us many times, actually quite a few times, and that way we obfuscate our interest in certain things. So that’s one piece. So don’t get your feelings hurt. As the point of that, it’s it’s a thing that we’ve carefully thought about, and so if we’re interested, we will try to find a home. The second thing to date, I think this is still true. To date, the space RCO has never gone and asked the corporate structure and Congress for more money because we are being bad at acquisition.

Seth Lacy – Bad knock on something. Yeah, is this wood?

Colonel Owen Stephens – No, it’s not anybody that understands the business knows that that’s like completely unheard of, and I think, largely like completely not true for every other acquisition organization. I’m not sure it’ll remain true forever, but at least to date, we very carefully manage our budget, and we have programs of record that we must fund. And because we carefully manage our budget, and we and and, and we have programs of record we must fund. We don’t have a lot of cash line around to do fun things or mature technology. We have tried a number of avenues in order to enable our ability to. Mature technology and a number of partnerships.

Our partnership with them, we value very greatly, because they work on things we care about. And we’re partnering with space works and the small business community, because that is a source of money you can we could have an interesting conversation about whether there would be a better way to mechanize that, which some folks in the audience may or may not have heard me talk about. I won’t bore everybody with that right this second. But another thing we do is we partner with others who have money, and we might have a little bit, we’ll partner with somebody else who might have a little bit, and we form a consortium with enough money to try to accomplish the thing that we’re trying to accomplish. So that is a thing we do. So I can’t specifically say I’m going to have $15 million to fund stratfize With if somebody catches our eye with a Stratfor, that is another thing I can claim to understand right now. What I, what I can offer to all the people who wrote the very specific question, is that if you if what you’re working on falls within our Venn diagram, somewhat, we will try to figure out how to enable the that particular thing to flourish. That is what I can say.

Jeff Foust – All right, great. Another popular question, and I think maybe this be good for for Mike or for Fig, how are multi-mission vehicles impacted by launch capabilities? I think you’d be good to answer that given fireflies both a launch provider and spacecraft developer.

Michael Creech – Yeah, so how are multi-mission vehicles impacted by launch capability? Right? That’s an interesting one. I think, where my head kind of goes to is more on the launch side and launch availability, on getting you to the orbits you need to go to, being able to carry your satellite where it needs to go. And so like, that’s one of those things that I think is interesting in a differentiator for our alpha launch vehicle. Having a one ton cap capability, it’s able to launch a larger size satellite. And I know we saw a trend of proliferation towards very small satellite, and we’re seeing with Space Development Agency, those satellites start to become more in the 500 kilogram class, which kind of rules out some of the smaller type launch vehicles. But with our alpha launch vehicle that enables, we still have launches, to enable those, what seems to be the sweet spot in kind of like a medium class vehicle, to service multiple missions, and then being able to launch to different orbits, tactically responsive launch, I think, is another one. So I think, like, there’s a lot of elements around there that I think really enable multi-mission. But I think having the capability to launch where you need to go, when you need to go as quickly as possible, I think, is really probably the enablement. And then we’ll get the right size

Jeff Foust – I might just add to follow up. If you have something that has kilometers per second of delta V, you have to be nearly as picky about the particular launch opportunity. Can you just basically hitch the next ride that’s that’s available, and then maneuver to wherever position you want to go. Rather than, say, I need to go to a specific sun synchronous orbit with a specific Crossing time or something like that.

Michael Creech – I think it’s probably a bit of column A column B, to be honest. I think that certainly you could launch and then use that delta V to get to a different orbit. So, you know, we certainly look at using our space maneuver vehicles to do that orbital transfer, like we talked about earlier. But I would imagine that say Colonel Stephens probably wants to use that kilometers, a second of delta V to do something else, other than just, just to get from, you know, a Leo orbit up to Geo like I imagine he probably needs that do something else. So I think, honestly, it’s probably a bit of both, depending on the use case.

Israel Figueroa – I think the so the launch, launch vehicle is an enabler of the mission, right? It’s not, it’s not the mission itself is an enabler. So I see, I see them as Yes, as delta v becomes more abundant. You might be able to launch multiple spacecraft in one location. That’s where you know the larger rocket fireflies developing their Eclipse, medium sized rocket. You can launch multiple spacecraft once in one location, and then they go and execute their mission, where they need to go and execute their mission, but what delta V? I mean those these maneuvers. I think people underestimate how much delta b you actually need to do some of these hard maneuvers in space. So I don’t see, I see a future where you’re still going to need to be. Able to launch to multiple orbits, because you want to save your delta b to actually do the mission that you’re there, to do what not, not spend most of your energy on, on the actual on the transfer, to get to where you want to be. So it’ll be, it’ll be a combination of two. I assume that for national defense, you want that delta V, you want that spacecraft to do the mission for as long as you can. So you want to, you want to use that delta V for, you know, things that matter, that matter to you?

Jeff Foust – Great, we’ve got unfortunately, less than a minute left, so we won’t be able to go to any more questions. But I want to quickly go down the line here and here and and say, What’s the biggest thing that can happen in, say, the next 12 months to help enable multi-mission orbital vehicles, whether it’s it’s it’s technology procurement, whatever the case may be, what’s the biggest thing that can happen in the Next 12 months to make these vehicles a reality.

Colonel Owen Stephens – Funding, you go first.

Israel Figueroa – So we need a stable, stable budget. Over the last few years, the SML program office have not been funded. We need a steady This is, again, I’m talking from the national security perspective. It has been space, mobility and logistic have been towards the top of the command, the combat and Commander requirements. But then when it comes to the budget, it’s just not getting the love that that, apparently, the war fighter wants. So it’s not getting funded. You need a stable budget so that the program managers can actually plan and develop, develop the ecosystem. So right now that that has been a problem, from my perspective, that’s number one, all right, on the list,

Michael Creech – and I think just to key off that budget from like a firefly goal perspective, like we need predictability and stability. So, you know, I really hope that we can get a FY 26 budget going here pretty soon, and that that would give clear demand signals as to what’s going to happen. And then we could partner with Colonel Stephens, Seth and others on how can we serve their needs once that funding starts flowing? All right?

Seth Lacy – I’ll pick a little bit on the on the tech development side. I think that getting over the hump of we really have no refueling is on my mind. No refueling capabilities in space today, to getting into, okay, I have five or 10, you know, refueling interfaces, and, you know, fuel systems that have been successfully tested in space, getting over that hump of I’ve got nothing to oh, I have some kind of options, and some are probably better than others, but getting from zero to more than zero, look really looking forward to that.

Colonel Owen Stephens – All right, okay, I thought about it the whole time. All right, I’m going to turn into an economics nerd on y’all quickly, quickly, quickly. The government needs to understand whether space is still primarily a public good or a commercial good. So there’s a number of things that the government has funded to get them mature, and then they turned into great commercial dual use success and and and those are wonderful stories. The computer government funded IBM, the internet the government funded was a DARPA net, or whatever it was like. There’s all these examples, but those are things that private individuals and companies would find it difficult to realize the return on sale needed to develop it into a true thing, right? And space is in that really awkward period, like we figured out some great commercial use for LEO and Starlink and all that stuff.

We haven’t quite figured that out for the rest of space, or to include cislunar and the moon or whatever. And so we’re on that and that awkward stage between, is this a public good that the government should should mature, needs to mature, if it wants it to mature into a dual use, commercial success and and we need to figure that out, because some of these things, I suspect, if left to their own commercial devices, simply will not come true. I think that is true. I won’t name any of them, but I think it’s true. And so if we all want them to come true, then the government needs to come to that realization and then properly fund them stable. Funding, right? So I turned into an economics nerd.

Jeff Foust – Okay, well, hopefully this is provided some high delta V for for you in terms of thinking about the future of this topic. Thank you everyone for attending.