If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 179, Brock Howe, Bishop Airlock program manager at Nanoracks, details the history, design, and capabilities of the permanent commercial module that is now attached to the International Space Station. This episode was recorded on December 9, 2020.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 179, “Commercial Airlock.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring you the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you one what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. A new commercial airlock has been delivered and installed on the International Space Station. Now this is not the airlock that you think of for spacewalks, the one where astronauts get into spacesuits and go out the hatch to work on the outside of the International Space Station. This airlock is commercial, which means it’s a facility owned and operated by a company, and that facility has costumers. It’s called the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock. This airlock can deploy free-flying payloads such as CubeSats, and it can install externally mounted payloads. It can house small payloads for research and in-space manufacturing. It can jettison trash and recover external orbital replacement units — ORUs, or spare parts for the stations such as pumps and other hardware. This commercial activity is enabled through some of NASA’s recent efforts to commercialize low-Earth orbit. So, on this episode, we’re bringing in Brock Howe, Bishop Airlock program manager at Nanoracks to get into the details. Brock discusses the airlock’s design, its capabilities, how it will work in orbit, and its future as a permanent commercial module of the International Space Station. So, let’s get right into it. The new commercial airlock on the International Space Station with Brock Howe. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host:Brock Howe, thanks for coming on Houston We Have A Podcast.

Brock Howe: Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Host:Alright. Really want to dive right into this commercial airlock, getting to know just what this thing is all about. I think when we think about airlocks, we think about, you know, astronauts going outside, working on the outside of a spacecraft. This is a little different, so I want to get into the details. But I want to start with the fact that we’re just recording this maybe two days? Yes, two days after CRS-21 docked to the International Space Station. This is the SpaceX cargo vehicle that brought Bishop up to station. Did you get to watch launch? You know, what were some of your feelings of that moment of actually seeing all the hard work that you put into this airlock actually launching on top of a rocket?

Brock Howe: OK. Yeah, great. Yeah. That’s a — you know, it’s kind of an awesome feeling. We’ve been working on the airlock for nearly five years now. So, to be able to see it on orbit, successful delivery by the by the SpaceX Dragon, Falcon 9 rocket, is really awesome. I did go down for the launch, and we actually watched it from the beach. So, I had all the NASA badges, I could get really close if I wanted to watch the launch. But we chose to watch it from the beach and kind of like, why’d you watch it so far away? Well, the things that we did was, a few of our people couldn’t get badged, some of our team members were there, and we weren’t able to do — we weren’t able to get them onsite, and then we also had lots of family that came in to watch the launch. I kind of wanted to be there with the team. Kind of wanted to be there with the family and celebrate. You know, not only the team members that put all the hard effort into it, but all the family and friends that supported us all along the way, and dealt with the long hours that we had to deal with up to launch, so we all gathered around kind of in the tailgate fashion, so we had a TV down on the beach, and had a few drinks. And yes, we watched it straight from the beach, and it was really awesome. It was really — a sight to see. And you know, we thought about what’s your feelings and emotions going into it. You know, we’re riding uphill. We’re a big payload in the rocket, so there’s a lot of responsibility to make sure that the structure stayed sound throughout the entire launch, so there’s a certain amount of responsibility there. So, no matter how good my team is, no matter how much confidence I have in them, there’s always that sense of oh, what can go wrong? Did we tighten the bolts right? Did we do all the numbers correctly? Did we test the structure correctly? So, there’s a certain responsibility there that we don’t come apart and damage and destroy the rocket. So, all that nervousness going uphill, and then when we first got first sight of the airlock, I think it was about 12 minutes into the flight, we had that Dragon separation. We were able to view directly into the trunk and we saw our airlock there, and again — one piece, no loose parts floating around, no — it wasn’t sitting kind of cock-eyed in there, but everything looked super once she got on orbit. So super — we were really stoked about that whole thing. It was really great event. Celebrated with a little bit of champagne you know, all that kind of good stuff. And it took — but it’s still just the first step. A huge first step, but so as the first step, we got activation coming up, and installation on ISS here in about a week and a half, and really excited about that. But for now, we’re going to celebrate. We’re going to celebrate that we’re there, and on orbit, and we’re looking good.

Host:That’s fantastic. And you got to do so with a lot of the folks that worked so hard on it and shared that experience. That whole emotion, right? The excitement of launch, the nerves of making sure that everything was checked off, and then finally the relief of seeing your payload there. That’s — what an incredible experience. I want to dive right into this Brock, and really understand what this is. We’ve mentioned it before this is the payload that was in the unpressurized trunk of Dragon. We’ve talked about it as a commercial airlock. What is it? What is the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock?

Brock Howe: Yes. So, it’s — as you mentioned, it is a commercial piece of hardware. It’s actually the very first permanent commercial module for the space station. It’ll be completely owned and operated by Nanoracks. We’ll get into the details of what that really means later on. But it’s — it will actually be the fourth airlock for the space station. So, in general, and airlock is basically a doorway. So, it’s considered a doorway from the inside of the space station to the outer — to out to space and the environment around the space station. So, to back up a little bit, so being the fourth airlock, the other three that are currently onboard the station, two of them are for crew members. So, there’s one on the U.S. segment, one on the Russian segment. Those two are for to allow the crew members to go out on their spacewalks, on their EVAs. And so, that’s a personnel airlock, and then there’s a cargo or an experiment airlock that’s over on the Japanese experiment module, Kibo. And that airlock allows for hardware and equipment and experiments and payloads to be able to transition from inside the space station to the outside, and vice versa. So, they can bring them back in as well. The Nanoracks Bishop Airlock would actually be the fourth one as a cargo and experiment payload airlock as well. But it’s about five times the size of the one in the Japanese module. So, it’ll bring a lot bigger capability that ISS programming and the experimenters have never been able to have before. And so, it’s considered a much larger doorway to space. Broaden capabilities for scientists and experimenters to be creative in ways that they’ve never been before. So it’ll be — we talk a lot about the ISS and its 20 years on orbit, and it’s a world-class NASA laboratory in low-Earth orbit, and it’s really neat that Nanoracks is able to play a part in that, to expand those capabilities, expand that laboratory to even do bigger and better things that have ever been done before.

Host:That’s incredible. Now, when did that really start? This idea of saying, “hey, this is something that we Nanoracks can actually participate in. We can expand those capabilities. We want a bigger airlock.” You know, when did this start — this idea start generating?

Brock Howe: Yes, so a little over five years ago we came up with the idea. And it was literally a clean sheet of paper. You talk about drawing things on napkins. It was literally something along those lines where we came up with the idea of hey, “we need a bigger airlock. Now why do we need a bigger airlock?” So, it actually is a really cool part of the commercialization of low-Earth orbit. We had customers that were coming to us, Nanoracks, to be able to deploy payloads. So, a lot of the work that Nanoracks does is deploying satellites. Putting experiments on the outside of the space station. Really trying to get payloads to space. So, one of those things, we’re using that Japanese airlock that we talked about earlier quite a bit. So, we were using it several times a year. And to give you a size perspective, that Japanese airlock can move a payload that’s about the size of a microwave oven. So, we had payloads that were going out that were about that size. But then we had some payloads that were saying hey, “we’re a little bigger than a microwave. We want to be able to go outside as well,” and we didn’t have a way to do that. And we came up with the idea of, why don’t we just build our own airlock? Build it bigger than what we can do right now, and also have commercial control over opening that airlock. So, away we went with the idea, and in general, the airlock can handle something about the size of a refrigerator. So, now there’s a lot more capability as far as just pure size, or also quantity. So, we can send a lot more equipment out at one time for an airlock operation than we’ve ever been able to do before. So, Nanoracks came up with the idea about five years ago, and it took a while to convince people to be able to do that. We had to — in particular, NASA had to get on board with us. So, it took a little while to convince them that we can do this commercially. We could raise the money to make it happen. And then technically be able to make it happen as well. That we had the engineering team, to design her, the facilities to build and integrate the tester, and the team together. So, we had to build the team. We had to build our own capabilities to be able to tackle those projects from five years ago. And now here we are, so we go from a clean sheet of paper to an airlock that’s now safely onboard the ISS is really pretty fascinating. And what someone had, it was NASA embracing that commercial marketplace. And then having faith in us to be able to make this happen. So that’s where we’re at. That’s where the idea came from some five years ago, and I appreciate all the effort from all our partners as well as NASA in particular to make that happen.

Host:Yes, that’s right. It’s a much larger effort isn’t it. It was — you know — of course working with NASA and making sure that everything’s safe and good for this commercial airlock to go in orbit, but you had a couple commercial partners as well.

Brock Howe: Yes, we sure did. So, we had several folks working on it to give you an idea, so a few of those key members — of course Nanoracks did all the design work and all the analysis to support all of that effort. But when we started the airlock, we knew we were going to birth two, no three port, so we needed a birthing mechanism. This is a similar birthing mechanism that’s used on all the other ISS modules. But we knew we needed to make one of those. So, we contracted with Boeing, and Boeing provided that passive, common birthing mechanism, which is currently on the airlock. And that will provide the sealing of the airlock to the ISS as well as the bolts that made it to the space station. A critical piece of equipment provided by our friends at Boeing. And then we also needed somebody to actually build the hardware. Build all this stuff to our designs, so we actually partnered up with Thales Alenia. They’re one of the world leaders in all the modules, a lot of the modules on the station were built by them in Torino, Italy. And so, we partnered up with them. I’d never actually worked with them before, and so I was a little bit nervous about this, but it turned out to be a fantastic relationship with them. They did a great job on our structures in building it all to our drawings. We put several of our engineering team members as well as myself, in their factory right on the floor, so we could work directly with their skilled technicians to make that thing happen. So, they took a while, but we were able to work through all that. And they did also, some of the pressure testing, some of the critical inspections on the airlock. So, they performed — they kind of were the first ones to really bring the airlock to life if you will. And then we had other partners, like Oceaneering. They provided some of the robotic interface devices, so the airlock can host a lot of payloads, which makes it more than just a doorway. So, we’re able to host payloads on the airlock, so it’s kind of — if you want to call it an elaborate door if you will. So, this capability to host payloads provided by a key components from Oceaneering, these external mounts are called GOLD 2 fittings. GOLD for General Oceaneering Latching Device. And so, we worked with them to make that happen. And then just overall structures and engineering, we had all the structural thermo analysis provided by a company called ATA Engineering. We actually got their, some of their engineers to actually be in our facility sitting right next door to our engineers who were designing the airlock so we could have a smooth flow of information between the analyst and the design engineers. And then Craig Technologies team came in later as we were building up our avionics. And they supported building up our — several of our cables and some of the critical electrical components to make all that happen. So yes, it’s kind of a team effort. And what’s kind of cool is I got a lot of feedback from all those partners the day of launch, because they were all cheering us on, you know. All the way from Europe in particular Torino, and all across the United States. We had partners all across the country and so, lots of folks cheering us on. That made that launch experience even extra special.

Host:I love how you described so many, you know, all the contributions there. There really, really puts into perspective the scope of just all the work that went into this one thing, the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock, and you know, we’re going to get into a lot of the capabilities here that make it you know more, as you’re saying, more than just a doorway. You know, all these different things that it has the ability to do. Now, that’s a lot of different components, Brock. You talked about the passive common birthing mechanism, you talked about the structures, you talked about the avionics. Now, how did all the testing and verification go? What were some of the things you were doing to make sure that this thing was ready to go into space?

Brock Howe: OK. So, yes. So, one of the first things we talked about a little bit when we built the structure, of course we had to make sure it’s sound, to be able to handle the pressures in space. So, the ISS atmosphere at 14.75 psi, we need to test the structure and make sure it can handle those kind of pressures, and also the leaks rate. You know, a lot of things going on. You know, critical items, critical safety items of — we don’t want to have any leaks when you get onboard. So, Thales Alenia did a lot of that testing in their facilities for us with the guidance from our engineering team. And so, a lot of leak testing was done early on the vehicle. And then we get into the avionics. So, all the avionics was designed and built here at Nanoracks, at our facility. So, we bring the whole — all that avionics together now. You know, as with anything space-related and ISS-related, we had a lot of environmental testing that goes on that to — avionics from the thermal vacuum environment to test it in, to the vibration environment from launch, to just the interface requirements of electrical magnetic interference, power quality, that kind of testing was all performed by the Nanoracks engineers at various test sites around the local area, here in Texas. And all this is all being done during, with all this COVID restrictions. So, added a whole other element of difficulty on the team to be able to do all this type of testing during this pandemic, and then we brought it all together to get the full vehicle together here. We have a clean room here in our Nanoracks facility, and we did a full vehicle level testing here at our location, at Nanoracks. And then once we’re completed here, then we shipped her down to Florida, and we had a few weeks of integrated testing there at the space station processing facility at KSC. And then we delivered over to SpaceX for installation in the trunk in the mid-October timeframe.

Host:There you go. Wow. So, that — yes, a lot of work all coming together, and then finally saying farewell, and then you mentioned actually launching into space. Let’s really get into the capabilities here. We’ve previewed a couple of them. You’ve talked about deploying CubeSats, you talked about the size of this thing. Five times the size of the Japanese airlock. And you’ve talked about hosting payloads, a couple more things. Some of the capabilities, Brock that the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock can do.

Brock Howe: OK. So yes, one of the bread-and-butter things for Nanoracks is deploying satellites. We deployed I think a little over 300 satellites to low-Earth orbit off of the space station. That’s a bunch of CubeSats. And also, some small satellites as well. So, if we’re thinking — if you’re familiar with the CubeSat form factor, I like to go back to kind of the kitchen analogy in sizes. A CubeSat typically run the size of a bread loaf of hardware. Right now, when we’re going through the Japanese airlock, all of our deployers, we can deploy about a maximum of what they call 48U. So, a U is a 10-centimeter cube volume, typically they’re like three of those long, so about 30 centimeters long by 10 by 10, which forms a factor size of a loaf of bread. So, of those, the 48U that’s usually about 16 satellites. That’s about as much as you can do through the Japanese airlock. Now when you throw that kind of capability at that five times the size of the Nanoracks airlock, we’ve estimated we could deploy up to 480U. So, from 48 to 480U of CubeSats, that’s a lot of CubeSats. That’s a lot of stuff you can put out into space. Now, we could do that, but that would be a huge amount of experimenters all come together at one time to try to make a sorting. So, there is ways to do that, and work that. But that just gives you an idea of the increased capability of the Bishop Airlock. You know, can handle very large satellites. Also, right now we deployed some small satellites, so these are on the say, microwave oven size payloads that we talked about. These are about 50 to 100 kilograms per satellite. We can do one of those at a time through the Japanese airlock. Now, we can deploy out of the Bishop Airlock about four of those at one time. Or we could go up to one very large satellite that would go up to about 300 kilograms. So, we’re moving in direction of a lot bigger capabilities than have ever been seen before as far as deploying satellites out to space. And yes. So, that’s what we’re looking at as far as payload deployments. We still deploy very, very similar to how we do the — through the Japanese airlock, where we get the deployer out, and we actually point the deployer down and aft 45 degrees. This is to minimize the risk of re-contact of those deployed satellites back with the ISS. So, the whole deployment is very controlled. The ISS — the space station program has a great jettison policy that we follow to meet all the safety guidelines for deploying payloads. We’re very familiar with that. We’ve been doing this for a long time. So, we will continue to do that very same capability, but now just at a much larger size.

Host:Alright. And you can also, I guess well, let’s get into kind of how that works. Because I think you mentioned it’s going to be — it’s going to go out and it’s going to point down. So, in order for that to happen — I’m trying to imagine — like how would you describe the shape of the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock? Maybe like kind of like a jellyfish maybe? Or the top portion of a jellyfish?

Brock Howe: [laughs] Yes, yes, yes, yes. Not too bad, not too bad. We call it a bell jar —

Host:Bell jar, that’s good.

Brock Howe: — structure. So, it’s a dome-shaped structure. If you ever did any bell jar type of experiments, maybe in your physics classes or chemistry classes back in the day. Yes, so this thing’s like a bell curve with a seal at the bottom. And the seal is the passive common birthing mechanism. So, this is a very odd airlock if you will. Most airlocks have an entry door and then a vestibule area and then an exit door. We don’t have any of those doors. We don’t have any vestibules — the whole airlock actually comes off of the stack. I call it the stack of the ISS. So each time we go out and do an airlock operation, that robotic arm pulls us off of the space station and then maneuvers us either to a payload deployment position or maybe to a parking position, or somewhere else on the space station where we can then do the work and deploy and maneuver payloads and those kind of things. So, the way it works, and how the operation will flow will be the crew members will make entry into the airlock through the hatch on the end of Node 3. They will install the payloads and the equipment or deployers. And then it will retrieve out of the airlock and back into Node 3. Then they close the hatch and before we’re ready to deploy, we’ve got to depressurize the airlock. So, we depressurize the airlock just like you would any other airlock. You don’t want to depressurize of course the entire ISS internal volume. So, you depressurize just the airlock. And once this is depressed, then the space station robotic arm can grapple the airlock, and then remove it off of the space station. And then we’re free to go wherever we need to go. So, we’ve designed the airlock with a lot of flexibility, so that it can be maneuvered in a lot of different locations to support a lot of different capabilities, and we’ll talk some more of those later. Then once we go out, and we jettison, just like we talked about, we deploy in a certain orientation, and then once the deployment is complete, then we maneuver back to our home at Node 3. They depressurize the airlock, do all the leak checks again, just like we would normally do to make sure we ensure crew safety. And then the crew will then be able to open the hatch, transit back into the airlock. They retrieve the leftover pieces. They kind of deploy their mechanisms and all that, because some of that stuff’s fairly high dollar. And then when they can return that hardware to the ground where we can refurbish it and recycle it, and send it back up again with even more satellites, and more payloads, and more customers. So, we just keep repeating that process over and over and over again as we use the airlock.

Host:There you go. Yeah, that’s kind of — it’s kind of cool that the whole thing comes off. You know, you just have the hatch, the common birthing mechanism hatch that separates the ship from Node 3, and really, you’re just closing that and taking the whole thing off, pointing it wherever you need to go. I like that 45-degree angle aft is sort of towards the back of the station, pointing it down. So that’s pretty cool that that has that ability. And what’s — so you mentioned it deploys CubeSats. You talked about the total volume. Now, you’ve also said it can host you know, much larger payloads. I wonder if for CubeSats, is there a limit there, or can you deploy much larger CubeSats now with the capability of Bishop?

Brock Howe: Oh, yes. We can definitely deploy a lot larger capabilities, a lot larger satellites than we’ve ever been able to before. One of the other little interesting items is that the — our current deployers use the small arm, or the SPDM Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator. It has little bit limited capabilities as far as the spring force that we can use for the smaller satellites. But it works well for the smaller satellites, but for the bigger ones they need a little bit more oomph if you will, little more velocity, or little more force to be able to deploy them. On the Bishop Airlock, we’ll be able to use the main arm of — the main Canada arm, and that has a lot more load-carrying capability. As you can imagine, it was used to assemble the space station, so it has a little bit more capability than a smaller arm. So, this gets us also added capabilities to deploy these much larger satellites than we’ve ever been able to deploy in the past. So, that really adds some additional capabilities. Lots of little details in there that can trip you up. And big things to NASA, so of course to help us through all that process and work through all those capabilities. So, we’re counting on the ISS, we’re counting on that Canadian arm a lot to build, to deploy these things, again working as a team, making all that happen.

Host:Very cool. Now that’s just one capability, right? This, deploying satellites, deploying larger satellites, more satellites. The other thing you talked about was it has the ability to host payloads. Now what does that mean?

Brock Howe: OK. So, as we designed the airlock, we were focused originally, you know five years ago, it was just work on the door, work on the door. Within about six months we realized this door is going to have quite a bit of real estate if you will. So, as real estate on the outside, it was kind of a bare bones airlock at the beginning, and then we were looking at it and going you know, “we got a lot of space out here on the outside of the structure as well as on the inside of the structure. Hey, let’s make this thing more of a — not just a dumb doorway if you will, kind of a smart doorway, elaborate doorway to be able to host payloads.” So, we added – again we kind of went to as I had mentioned before, our friends and partner over at Oceaneering. Started talking to them about having external payload mounts. So, these are robotically installed and removed payload mounts that experimenters can use on the outside of the airlock. Fortunately, the ISS is very busy, right? There’s lots of external payload mounts on the outside of ISS. These are for payloads that may look at the Earth, they may look at the stars. They made materials exposures, and type experiments. And a lot of those payload sites were tied up. They were being used. Not a whole lot of vacancy at the end for external payload. So, we said, “why don’t we just add some payload sites that can add capabilities?” So, we had these externally mounted mounts, they’re all robotically controlled so the experiments can attach to the outside of the airlock. And then also we then provided all the avionics to be able to provide them a power — not only operational power, but keep-alive heater power, and they also have — provide them with communications via Ethernet that can communicate back to the space station, local area network, and eventually back down to the ground. So, we give them full payload command and control capability. And full payload or power capability, and so these sites are then for sale if you will. So, the sites are out there and available for payloads to use with a variety of different clean options, and again and a way to get there, which is using the airlock to actually get them there as well. So those are all along the outside, and we also have similar capabilities for mounting payloads on the inside. So, we have sites on the inside of the airlock. They can bribe the same thing. They don’t have to be robotically installed like they are on the outside, but on the inside the crew can install them, and we provided them with power and the data capabilities just like we do on the outside. So, on the outside in summer, there’s six external payload sites, and on the inside, there’s up to four payload sites on the inside. And on the inside, there’s a lot more flexibility because there can be a variety of different shapes and sizes, and Nanoracks can help the experimenters to find what shape and size their experiment needs to be to fit within the airlock. So, lots of capabilities to host those payloads.

Host:Nice. On the inside are these payloads — is that part of that section that’s being re-pressurized and depressurized for the operations — I guess the cycles of the operations? So, those payloads will be kind of in and out of vacuum?

Brock Howe: Yes, so they can be. So that’s a great point about the airlock. So, if you think about the operational frequency of the airlock. So, we envision the airlock to be used probably five to ten times a year. The more the better for us, right? We’re all excited about do more work with payloads, but we expect it somewhere in that ballpark. There’s lots of other things going on at the space station, so we understand there’s limitations on when the arm is available. There could be vehicles coming and going. And so — and crew times. There’s lots of things going on. So, imagine five to ten times a year, and say each of those are maybe two weeks in duration. So, we don’t go out on these sorties if you will when we’re out away from Node 3 for very long. We’re there for a week or two weeks. So, say we go five operations for two weeks at a time. That’s ten weeks. So, figure about two months at a time we’re off the station. That leaves us another ten months where we’re still attached to the station, alright? So, most of our times is actually when we’re attached to the station. So that’s when we can use those internal payloads to be able to use that time while we’re actually still attached to the space station, so they can get a good you know, month, two months, even three months’ worth of operations in between those sorties. If they ever run science on the inside, just like they do with other sciences onboard racks and internally mounted items, we can provide similar capabilities to the experiment racks that the ISS does. But now, maybe a little bit bigger volume that they can kind of free fit into rather than having to squeeze into a rack for a little bit more of a free volume that they can design to use.

Host:Got it. OK. That makes more sense. Your kind of turning it over a little bit more so that makes a lot more sense.

Brock Howe: Yes.

Host:Now, we’ve used this term “payload,” quite a bit. You know, anyone can send their payload to the outside. What exactly are these things? What are the types of payloads that Bishop can be hosting on the outside? What kinds of experiments? What kinds of hardware? What are the things we’re going to be putting out there?

Brock Howe: Right. So, a lot of the payloads on the outside will be you know, cameras for instance. Lots of folks looking at the Earth, evaluating change of the Earth, evaluating you know, climate change to geological changes and those kind of things. Lots of cameras, different types of sensors can be looking down at the Earth from the Bishop Airlock. Also have the ability seeing that we’re in the vacuum of space, those — some experiments are looking at new materials. How do they work in the vacuum of space, subjected to atomic oxygen and ultraviolet and radiation environments that we can host those kind of payloads? Also, you know, if they’re looking at the stars. Say a new star tracker, or star sensor that they may — a company may be developing to put on future satellites or future NASA missions. You know, they want to test out their equipment, they can test that out on the airlock before they go fly for the actual mission. So, we call a lot of them our technology demonstration-type payloads. They’re — they may have a working version on the ground, but they want to go fly to space, but they don’t want to put it on a vehicle yet. Or maybe they’re working through their sales, and they’re trying to get their technology readiness up a few levels. They can use the airlock to be able to do that. And so yes, lots of different capabilities. One of our — in fact one of our first customers is actually a commercial robot arm that will actually use the inside of the airlock to do a demonstration. They have this robot arm that’s a pretty cool arm. It’s been working on the ground, and they’re going to take it to the microgravity orbit and show that they can use it there as well, then potentially take that to the commercial marketplace for that. So, we’re looking for customers just like that too. And our customers can range from all types of different people from all over the world. We have a customer base literally worldwide, and as well from different industries. So, whether it’s government such as NASA or military to universities to commercial. So, we’re open to anybody and everybody using the airlock. Our goal here is to make space available to folks and give the best opportunities that they can to perform their experiments.

Host:Very cool. And you did mention the government as a customer. I know one of those things that we’re looking for is one of the capabilities of Nanoracks Bishop Airlock is this jettison capability. It’s not only for deploying satellites, but I know NASA is looking to deploy trash. So, is that something that Bishop is going to be doing, deploying trash?

Brock Howe: Yes, you bet. In fact, I think it might be one of the very first things that the Nanoracks Airlock will actually be doing. So, let’s talk a little bit — let’s talk some trash if you will, talk a little trash here. So yes. Trash you know, people don’t really think about trash, but it’s obviously critical time. So, we talk about being a world-class laboratory, and sometimes in a world-class laboratory you’ve got to keep your things squared away. So, if you end up having a lot of trash around, you need to clean up your workspace so you can do the cool science. So, let’s talk about how does NASA deal with trash right now? So, the cargo vehicles are coming and going from the space station, whether it’s Cygnus or SpaceX or HTVs, those vehicles are coming and going. When they go, they are delivering lots of cool hardware, usually new stuff, new experiments, food, clothing, those kind of things. But what’s not talked about is that at the end of their mission, they’re typically loaded up with trash. And so, they are then load up that trash in these vehicles, and they come back down. Now if you think about trash at your household, the trash truck shows up you know, once, twice a week, and you put it to the curb and away it goes, and you’re happy. On space station, it’s not — doesn’t happen that — as frequently as that. These cargo vehicles are coming every couple months, so every two to three months. Imagine your house that your trash — you have to hold your trash inside your house. You don’t even get a garage. You have to hold your trash inside your living area of your house and tuck it away until that trash truck shows up every couple months. That can get you know, a little rough on the crew, on the living and the working conditions of your NASA laboratory. So, what this Bishop Airlock can do, now with this refrigerator-size type payload jettison capability, is that Nanoracks is actively working on a trash deployer system. This isn’t like your normal trash bag at your house. It’s not the kitchen-size trash bag. This is about a trash bag that’s about as big as a refrigerator and holds about 600 pounds. So that’s a big trash bag, but what it does, give the astronauts and the crew capability is to be able to load this trash bag up whenever they need to. So, as things build up, they’re then able to load this trash in this trash bag, then deploy the airlock out. They deploy the trash bag overboard. That trash bag will then circle the Earth for about roughly a year. Depends on the size of the bag and the mass of the bag, but it’ll eventually degrade in orbit, and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. Much like they do with the visiting vehicles, with their trash, they burn up in the vehicle. At least the Orbital Cygnus does. So, that’ll allow the crew now to get rid of that trash a little bit more frequent basis. Now it’s become even more important right now is we’re starting to see a lot of neat, new and more astronauts visiting the space station. We’re talking about Commercial Crew going up there a lot more frequently, so we got a lot more astronauts, a lot more astronauts, comes a lot more trash. So, you know, we’ve got to kind of take care of business. And so, this capability will be able to help maintain or help deal with the trash situation on orbit.

Host:Very important capability, yes. And having that large size definitely helps. Now I know one of the other things Bishop can do is, it can retrieve something called ORUs. Some people call them spare parts. Maybe other hardware that’s hosted on the outside. What is this capability, retrieving ORUs?

Brock Howe: OK. So ORUs are Orbital Replacement Units. There’s lots of equipment on the outside of the space station from pumps to batteries to — oh gosh — and experiments as well that are already outside. Some of that equipment’s been out there for a while. You know, we talked about space station’s been around for 20 years. So, all that hardware’s getting a little dated. Some of that hardware was designed to be maintained and upgraded by the astronauts in spacewalking in suits and everything. Sometimes they have failures that they can’t repair in their spacesuits, their gloves are just too big. They don’t have the dexterity in their fingers. They don’t have the capability for small parts to be able to do repairs on those orbital replacement units. So, what happens is those units just end up there, they either have to be thrown overboard, or just left in place and not working. Now what’s going on with this airlock, we can retrieve quite a number of those sized equipment. So, now instead of just throwing it away or not being able to use them, maybe we can — maybe we get NASA and the program to refurbish these things by bringing these parts from the outside of the space station back to the inside. So, the way it’ll work with the airlock is you send the airlock out empty on its sortie. It would go, deploy off of Node 3. It would be empty. You would park the airlock, and then they could retrieve the ORU and put it in the airlock, and then they would bring it back to Node 3. Once they’re back to Node 3 and repressurized and the crew can go in and actually work on this ORU. Now they’re working on it in shirtsleeves rather than their EVA suits and got capabilities to replace like circuit boards and camera lenses and fuses and things that they never could be able to replace before, and maybe be able to buy some more lifetime for the space station. Or do upgrades that they never thought possible. You know, think about computers and things that were around 20 years ago. And remember, some of those things were designed five and ten years even before that. So, some of these things are getting pretty dated as far as technology. Now maybe we can get them some new life if you will, by giving them some capabilities to upgrade them and get some new systems onboard. So, that’s just another capability that the airlock brings to the space station that we’ll see. We’ll have a lot of smart people figure out how to use the airlock. Our job is get the airlock there, get the capabilities there, and there’s a lot of smart people looking at innovative ways to use the airlock, and this is definitely potentially one of those.

Host:There you go. Now that’s a lot of different capabilities. Brock, in the beginning you talked about you know, how to depressurize and re-pressurize it, basically the function of an airlock. It is a coordinated effort though. There’s a lot of players here. You talked about there’s a Canada arm too, so there’s a robotic operations. There’s mission control. I’m sure Nanoracks has some communications folks, or some operations folks. So how is that all working? Whenever it’s time to actually use the airlock, you know? Depressurize to move over to retrieve an ORU, how are those operations working?

Brock Howe: Yes. So, we have a flight control team that’s located here in the Nanoracks office. We have our own mission control center called the BRIDGE. And we’re in direct contact with the airlock, so we monitor the airlock and its data. And do all the command and control for the airlock from this control center here. We do that 24/7. So, we monitor. And then in addition, we work through the payload control center in Huntsville, NASA’s control center there. That’s our primary point of contact. And we also work directly with the mission control center here in Houston. So, we work out the command and control of the airlock. Of course, there’s a lot of effort that leads up into those payload operations. So, we start about a year out, starting to do all the integration and crew procedures and everything. But when we’re ready to go, our team is talking directly with the NASA flight control team for all those operations, and the very closely coordinated team approach to making that happen. So, that’s one of the neat things about the airlock is that it’s fully commercially owned and operated by Nanoracks. So, it’s our responsibility to monitor it. It’s our responsibility for the upkeep up of it, and upgrades. And so that’ll go on for the lifetime of the airlock while it’s onboard for the rest of the lifetime of the space station, and that’s our responsibility to take care of her. And — but we work closely with NASA to make all those operations happen. And yes. We’re there to provide any — just another piece to the big global village of the International Space Station.

Host:Now, I’m sort of thinking through the operations here. Related to some of the capabilities we talked about, I know from — you know, if an astronaut is working on a payload, that seems kind of self-explanatory to me. You know, they put it into the airlock now. You’ve talked about there’s these areas on the outside of Nanoracks Bishop Airlock that can host payloads. I wonder, if you want to put a payload on the outside, how do you get it there? If you’re putting it in through the outside, how does it move from the inside to the outside? How does it actually get to that location?

Brock Howe: OK. Great. That’s a great point. It’s a little tricky, and there are some great videos out there, whether on Nanoracks website, YouTube actually has some great videos of how this actually happens. So, we’ll try to describe how it works here.

Host:Cool.

Brock Howe: What we have to do is, we do all these operations to move payloads all robotically. So, we don’t get the crew involved on the EVA. Those are sometimes very difficult to schedule, and there’s a lot of safety involved, and there’s a lot of integration that has to happen. So, we like to do things robotically, if we can. So, what we have to do is, we have to actually go out — we take the airlock off. So, we just talked about it, the crew goes into the airlock, solves the payload, closes the hatch, depressurize. Same as always. But instead of going out to a particular position or pointing area, we actually take the airlock, and we park it on the outside of the space station. So early on in the airlock design, we recognized that we’re going to want to do this kind of capability. So, we made an adaptor. One of the robotic arm grapple fixtures for the airlock. So, we take the airlock off. We actually have two of these grapple fixtures to interface with the robot arm. There’s identical piece of the arm mounted onto the what I call mobile base system. This is the cart that runs up and down the truss of the station. So, this parking spot — so this becomes like a parking spot for the airlock. So, we can take the airlock off of the Node 3, and we actually go park it onto this mobile base system. They actually call it a huge long acronym, [Mobile Base System Payload Orbital Replacement Unit Adapter]. So, we’ll call it MBS POA. So, [inaudible] and then in crazy terms, you know all this engineering stuff going on, crazy long acronyms and everything, but they all mean something. So, we go to this location. And this what it says is we park the airlock there, and so this device grabs onto the airlock and holds it firm. Now what we can do, we detach the robot arm from that grapple fixture that we just maneuvered with, with the robot arm. And then the robot arm can then reach inside the airlock, retrieve this experiment, and actually maneuver it out to where it’s going to reside, where its home is going to be, and install it. Whether that’s on the outside of the airlock itself, or on one of the other multiple experiment sites on the outside of the ISS, ORU locations, any of those kind of things. And then once that payload’s been installed out there, then the robot arm can come back and grab the airlock again and return it to Node 3, back to its home again. So, all this does, a very carefully choreographed robotic arm dance if you will of all these operations. A lot of great work was done by the robotics team at NASA and our design engineers to really make all that stuff work out and avoid collisions and clashes and make all those capabilities where give as much flexibility to the payloads, looking forward down the road. So pretty cool stuff. I can’t wait to see some of that stuff go on in real time on the station. It’s going to be some really neat-looking videos coming out of all those — all that dance of the robotics.

Host:Yea, parking it on the mobile base system. There’s the — like you said there’s like a latching end effector, that’s like the hand of the robotic arm. Yes, just latches onto that same end effector, and then yes, you park that and you’re able to go maneuver the robot arm inside and outside. That is so cool. And then on top of that, you got the deployment capabilities. You know Brock, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot to this. And you know, you’ve talked about that Nanoracks invested its own time and effort and money into this, to make this a capability. This is all part of building — that NASA is helping to enable a low-Earth orbit economy. Having commercial businesses like this operate real-time in space. Because there’s value to that. So, what are, for you Brock, for Nanoracks, what are Nanoracks’ goals for business in low-Earth orbit? You talked about a large customer base, but what are your overall goals here?

Brock Howe: OK. So yes. So, airlock represents kind of what we call the next generation Nanoracks payload facilities. So, we already have some commercial payload facilities inside the ISS, on the outside of ISS. This has — kind of upsizes all those capabilities. So, as we grow that business and continue to get more capabilities on ISS, you know what we’re looking to try to do is just try to get people to space. Let’s get people excited about using space. Let’s make low-Earth orbit really just another place to do business. You know? Just like you’d do business or build up capabilities here on the ground, let’s just get people the ability to do science on orbit. Our job is to kind of provide capabilities where those scientists can really be creative and give them kind of a place base if you will to be able to do some cool science. We’re not the ones that actually do the science. We’re the ones that provide capability. So, we’re looking for those young scientists out there to be innovative and think about ways and views in space like we’ve never used them before. We’ll provide them some workspace and capabilities to do that. And we really look forward to using that. Now what’s the next step? So, this airlock is not the end goal of Nanoracks by any means. Our next goal is really kind of working towards commercial space stations. Let’s continue this commercial effort. And so, the airlock kind of gives us some — well, really help grow our engineering capability here at Nanoracks. Now we’re doing safety critical structures; we’re doing high-power electronics; we’re doing a lot with command and control. Multiple different payloads. We got a lot of robotics activity, so we’re — we’ve really grown the team in those areas, but when you think about what’s it take to do a full commercial space station, there’s lots more things that we have to learn. But we got a lot of those pieces in place now with the airlock, and now we can grow forward and hopefully continue to find that commercial customer list, and we’ll make them really looking for — you know, get those — get them motivated and excited about doing work in space, and continue to provide them with even more capabilities down the road. So yes. So, Nanoracks is looking forward to continuing to grow this kind of effort.

Host:Very cool. A lot of ambitions for the commercial side of this. I wonder, how is NASA playing a role to help Nanoracks, to basically foster some of this business? What’s NASA’s role in all of this?

Brock Howe: OK. So yes, I’d be remiss to not tell you we talk a lot about partners or they’re probably in my mind the most critical, most important partner of this entire effort has been NASA. Like I said, when we started the idea five years ago you know, there’s a lot of people. People that doubt and there were a lot of people concerned about what we were doing. But what it took was NASA to embrace the commercialization. It was willing to listen to Nanoracks and listen to our ideas. And sometimes they might be a little bit crazy ideas, right? So, we’re pushing the envelope a little bit here, but NASA was willing to listen to us, and as a commercial company we say we can do this. We can make this thing happen, and folks will continue to come. So, one, it’s just embracing the commercial effort. That they’re willing to go in and partner with us on their Space Act Agreement. Non-funded. Just Nanoracks will build an airlock. NASA’s going to support it by providing a birthing site onboard the ISS and help us out with the launch. And those kind of things. And meanwhile, Nanoracks needs to raise the money and build an airlock to make that happen. So, NASA really embraced us. They also had the faith that we could do it, you know. Here’s a little company, little Nanoracks. Five, six years ago we didn’t have capabilities at the time to build safety critical structures and do some of these other things that we talked about. But they had the faith that we could make that happen. And so, they’ve been a huge help all along the way, fully embracing the commercial marketplace, and we just hope that we’re just one of many commercials. So, we’re on the front end of this thing, we’re the tip of the spear of a lot of these commercial efforts. We’re going to be the first commercial permanent module on the station, but they’re wanting more coming. So, we’re really looking forward to some of these other companies following behind us and providing a low-Earth orbit you know, capabilities that the world has never seen before. So again, NASA’s embracing that atmosphere. And just like we talked about you know, one of the big things for NASA, they just want to be another — just want to be one of many customers in low-Earth orbit. And I think you’re seeing that right here, even with the Nanoracks airlock. So, they’re — Nanoracks is, or NASA is one of our customers. And we also have ESA as a customer, and we’ve mentioned a commercial robotic arm GITAI as well. So, we got — already got government and commercial customers already signed up ready to use this airlock, and it’s all because NASA had the faith and the confidence and the willingness to embrace commercial space some five, six years ago.

Host:That’s very cool. There’s — yes, there’s a lot of potential here. A lot of growth opportunities for other businesses. A lot of — you know, you said a worldwide really customer base. It’s really anyone that can come through Nanoracks to do this, and it’s enabled by NASA. I know you mention NASA, ESA. You mentioned the robotic customer. I know NASA and ESA, European Space Agency in particular, they’ve already purchased — pre-purchased airlock cycles. I suppose that’s your business model in a sense, right? Perhaps airlock cycles, perhaps hosting capabilities. But what does that mean, the pre-purchase of airlock cycles?

Brock Howe: Yes. So, NASA and ESA both see the value of being able to maneuver large things from the inside of the space station to the outside, or from outside back in again. So, they’re willing to step up to the plate early on, while we’re still designing the airlock. And they had to kind of again, great show of confidence in Nanoracks to be able to get to this point that we are today. Where they wanted to buy in early, if you will. So, they saw the capability, really wanted to be part of that. That really helped us out with some of the milestones that we had to work through. So, having early customers really showed, won the confidence in particular to our investors, and then also helped us out with the business models and everything that we’re putting together. So, their willingness to get onboard early really helped to kind of solidify the airlock and get us to this point where we can finish off building the hardware and everything. So, the way it works is, like you said you know, we talk about you know, buying cycles, or I call it a sortie. So just like an aircraft sortie, goes out away from its base and then does its mission and comes back again, that’s kind of us, the airlock leaving Node 3 and going out, doing some work and then coming back again. So that’s one way of doing it. And just like we talked about, you mentioned hosting payloads. So those payloads either, whether on the outside or the inside, it’s almost kind of like rentals if you will. So, you can rent a space, rent a location on the outside of the airlock for a certain duration, and that’s our business model. So, then we get revenue, return on investment based on those people either using the airlock as a sortie or by the hosted payload capability that we have onboard.

Host:How about that? Brock, you’ve mentioned so many different capabilities here, so many opportunities. You know, we started off this conversation with talking about the excitement of launch. I wonder you know, you worked so hard on this. Talked about this whole effort being five years, and then finally seeing it on orbit. There’s a lot of unique capabilities to look forward to. But I wonder from your perspective as the program manager, what are some of those next things that you are just really looking forward to seeing and testing out seeing the Bishop Airlock in action once it gets operational here?

Brock Howe: Yes. One of the cool things that — one of the frequent things that we have to try to keep reminding ourselves as engineers, we want to design to a certain I call point solutions. Here — hey we want to deploy satellites out of the airlock. OK, so let’s design around that. We’re constantly talking to ourselves about “hey, let’s keep our blinders off. Let’s not get focused on the airlock just deploying satellites, or just hosting a payload.” So, what’s really pretty cool, what I’m looking forward to is working with some of these scientists, and seeing what people come up with. I mean I’m always just flabbergasted by some of the ideas that — and this could range from like I said you know, big government organizations with big science experiment all the way down to you know, kids in schools coming up with ideas and go you know, “hey I never thought about using it like that.” You know, that’s the kind of cool stuff that kind of gets me jived and really excited about this thing are the things that we’ve never thought about before. You know, we try to think about all these different ideas, and we talk a lot about those different capabilities. So, I’m open that there’s a lot of people out there that really push us along and go you know, “hey we want to use this airlock to do this.” I go, “man, I’ve never even thought about that before. Let’s see what we can do.” And so that gets pretty exciting when people come up with innovative and creative ways to use your equipment, and then do some really cool science that hopefully you know, will improve people’s lives down here on Earth. And — or improve the ability for us to explore the — our galaxy and beyond. And so, that’s what I’m looking forward for this facility is just working with those scientists and working with those experimenters to — let’s see what cool stuff we can do with her.

Host:What a fantastic way to end this conversation, Brock. So many things to look forward to. Really a very fascinating conversation. Brock, thanks so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. I really appreciate you coming on today.

Brock Howe: You bet. My pleasure.

[ Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. Really fascinating conversation we had with Brock Howe today. I hope you learned something about commercial spaceflight and all the activities that’s happening aboard the International Space Station. You could check out us at Houston We Have a Podcast at NASA.gov/podcasts. We have a few other shows that are there that you could tune into. If you want to talk to us, you can reach us at the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show, and make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on December 9th, 2020. Thanks again to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, and Abby Dickes. Thanks again to Brock Howe for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.