A New Era - Commercialization of LEO
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Hi you all! I’m Michael. I’m Michael Laine. I’m the president of LiftPort Group and if you're watching this, we've been doing videos for almost six or seven weeks now. I’m grateful that you're watching. Thanks for sticking with us.

Today is another thrilling adventure in space policy. Locally on our team, we refer to it as space policy Friday. I know that it’s not everybody's favorite topic but just I appreciate you all sticking with us. This stuff is important. Today, we're going to work through more of the space policy document that came out of Washington D.C. a couple of weeks ago. We're working on some cool stuff for next week. We've got some big updates on lunar missions coming up. We're going to go into LiftPort history. As always, this is where we're going. We're going to the moon. All of our conversations wrap around that big singular task.

Late July this year, the National Space Council and The White House issued this new policy. This new policy is changing everything. We've seen it evidence of those changes almost every day and every week since this policy came out some big stuff happened yesterday. We'll tell you about it in our next video. 

What we've been doing so far is really been a preamble to the main meat of this document. If you're interested in the preamble, take a look at the other videos. In the next set we're going to talk about these five big topics: Commercialization of LEO, Returning to the Moon, to stay, Extending humans to Mars and Deep space science, and wrapped within that we're always talking about Education & Workforce. This is the meat of this big kind of game-changing document. Right now, we're going to talk about low Earth orbit (LEO) but all of this has implications for everything else.

It's no surprise. I don't think The United States has been really been leading deep space exploration and especially hosting a long-term presence in low Earth orbit (LEO). Not everybody really realizes just how much we've done there though. The space shuttle has nearly a 40-year legacy. If you take into account, its design phase in the early 1970s to the first launch. Yuri’s Night on April 12th, 1981 to its conclusion in 2011. Nearly 40 years! Equally impressive, we've been operating at the International Space Station operating permanently with humans living off-world for 20 years. October is 20 years. We've gotten really good and humans have gotten really good at low-Earth orbit (LEO) development. That is vital to everything else that we want to do. But we're good at it. So, let's stay good. Let's get better at it! Let's use that as the stepping stone is the catalyst for the next part of our human adventure.
As much as I love the International Space Station (ISS), I’ve been quoted once as saying it's a human's grandest achievement. I would put it side by side with the Large Hadron Collider. I would put it side by side with a lot of amazing infrastructure assets. I think the International Space Station (ISS) is humans crowning achievement up to this point. But there is no way economically, politically, financially, logistically we are going to do that again. We are not going to duplicate this million-pound facility. It’s kind of astounds me that there is a million-pound structure just floating over our heads every 90 minutes. But in the same way that Artemis takes some heat for being Apollo on steroids. It's not but that's the criticism. I can't imagine a world where we build the International Space Station on steroids. That's a mark in our history books but it's not going to be repeated. So, what is going to be next is going to be a diverse collection of multiple space stations in multiple orbits. Specifically, those space stations are going to be commercially owned and operated. That's what's next. This is really exciting stuff. This document might be dull but the future that this document creates is extremely exciting. You're going to have stuff at ultra-low Earth orbit, low Earth orbit (LEO), Medium Earth orbit (MEO), Geosynchronous orbit (GEO), and out to the Lagrange points even extending to the surface of the moon. You're going to have a whole bunch of free-flying space stations. All doing slightly different things but that's going to enable humanity in a way that really nothing else ever has. These are stepping stones. They're important stepping stones.

Now, this document is taught. It's kind of ironic to me that you've got a government policy saying we're going to remove regulatory barriers. This is one document saying. We're going to take other documents off the table. I feel like there's a little bit of irony in there. In my experience, very few things ever remove regulatory barriers. So, I’m a little curious to see how this goes. The optimist in me wants this to happen, the realist in me is kind of skeptical. But I am excited about this very bold language about the private sector, pursuing revenue-generation activities. This is the basis of kind of the American approach to space. Release the capitalists and let them go do that what they do best. Find holes in the market, find holes and niches that they can exploit, and hopefully generate revenues out of it. So, I’m pretty excited about that. It is pretty markedly different than our near-peer competitors of China and Russia. Just the approach to the methodology of this. I think it is really important and going to be a test. It's going to be a test of those systems. The idea that those commercial companies get to retain their intellectual property is paramount. Honestly, companies like us, they invest a lot of time, resources, and cash to develop the technologies necessary to build these systems. That's got a return on investment otherwise the investors won't write those checks. Having this language here protects the whole ecosystem. That's also very good to see.

I have some issues with this language. The United States government will continue to be a major customer. Please let me know in the comments if I’m missing something. To my knowledge, the government's really only been a customer for two companies: Bigelow Aerospace and Axiom Space. Bigelow Aerospace has a history, heritage, and legacy. They've got free-floating assets in orbit and they've got stuff connected to the space station. Certainly, NASA and the government have been customers. Would I say, major customers? I think that language is a little misleading. With Axiom Space, I have a lot of confidence in those folks. But they are as yet unproven as a commercial provider. This language of Will continue to be a major customer, I think that's a bit misleading. It doesn't really characterize the environment accurately. I hope that the government takes on this anchor tenant position. But this language will continue to be a major customer. I’m going to take some issue with that.

These orbital platforms that build opportunities for us. It's not going to be easy. Along the way, we are going to have to perfect technologies. We're adequately good at now but need to be expertly good at. Space communications, we've been doing that for a long time but changes are coming. Especially, optical communications that will be a technology, we're going to watch develop soon. Propellant depots, the stuff of science fiction for decades generations not actually working in the real world and environment. That kind of stuff is going to have to get further developed. Ultimately, there's still stuff we need to know about human health and astronaut training. These orbital facilities are going to have a lot of work to do. 

This language here: Concepts of operations, Remember a couple of videos ago, we talked about some easter eggs and language that gave us some hints about who some of these authors are, the people who actually write these documents. When you talk about concepts about operations, as a former U.S Marine, I really zero in on that language and think. Probably some folks with some military experience wrote that. Yes, concepts of operations are used in lots of other places but my strong hunch is that this was the author of this section was probably somebody from the military. In-space manufacturing, Of course, we know we need to do that. Companies like Made In Space, Inc. are leading that but there are several others are in development. As we get better at that, we're going to get better at the launch requirements. Hopefully, we can build this stuff in orbit. The stuff that we need like a fuel that will facilitate all future missions to the moon and eventually to Mars.

This is a series. I appreciate you all watching. I’m going to jump straight into the next section here in a minute. Returning to the moon to stay, honestly, that's my favorite topic in this whole document. Stays tuned. I’ll be right back.