K+ Update | Q3 2023

Hi everyone,

We updated our website to add more content and interactivity, also running on the Ghost platform that we utilize for these updates.

Macro & Market

We finally saw the Psyche mission launch yesterday after its launch was delayed by a year. The spacecraft will cruise past Mars into the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to rendezvous with the asteroid Psyche sometime in 2029. That one year launch delay also has massive ripple effects for the mission, as it will now take over 3 years longer to reach its target because it needs to follow a less optimal trajectory.

We also saw the sample return from NASA mission OSIRIS-REx to asteroid Bennu last month, as it touched down in the Utah desert. The spacecraft is now on its way to a new target (asteroid Apophis, with a rendezvous in 2029) while scientists start exploring the sample it returned. Initial results were shared that show a distinct difference compared to asteroid Ryugu (more water and more carbon), we're looking forward to digging into a full analysis.

While the Bennu sample returned, space pharma/manufacturing company Varda has their samples stuck in space because of license problems with re-entry. They managed to launch and run their experiments, but have now been stuck in orbit circling for months waiting for their license. Lesson learned regarding timelines and possible issues regarding licensing...

The capital markets remain challenging for anyone not working on generative AI, but we are seeing some normalization in early stage funding in terms of deal flow. Most of these companies started at or after the peak of market in Q4 of 2021 and are built on a different set of assumptions that seems more palatable to investors.

Later stage private companies and the group of space companies that went public at the peak through SPACs are mostly in trouble, with valuations down 90+% in some cases. While some of that is market sentiment, a lot of it also clearly stems from inflated growth expectations as shown in this analysis of revenue forecasts and actual attainment for the various space SPACs.

We remain bullish about the broader growth in our domain but do expect significant fallout, both in the private and public markets. Survivability has become one of our core selection drivers for engagement with partners and vendors.

We landed on our mission name: 'High Frontier'

Written in 1976 as a blueprint for expansion into space, Princeton professor Gerard K. O’Neill worked with NASA and other researchers for decades to validate and prove out his plans. The elegance and comprehensivess of his vision blends together a fundamental optimism about our ability to build and engineer with rigorous planning and analysis to stress test the feasibility of his plans.

Combining space resources and space-based solar power with giant rotating space stations with artificial gravity, his vision brings together all of the fundamental elements of a society as well as an economy in space that feels achievable and feasible in way that makes you question why we didn’t go out and build all of this in the last 40 years.

We believe in this blueprint as an inevitable pathway for sustainable growth for humanity and want to accelerate that critical path as much as possible. It is the only growth path on Earth and it would also allow us to explore the solar system in ways that are impossible now.
We came across this video below recently as a wonderful example inspired by what would become possible if we make space resources abundant:

Karman+ board meeting while flying over the Saturn rings anyone?

High Frontier Mission Update

Our concept of operations (ConOps, our mission design) has been refined and run through an external review with a group of external experts from CU Boulder, MIT Lincoln Lab, Advanced Space, NASA JPL and CU LASP. We run our reviews in a more rapid and recurring flow, aimed at gathering constant input and feedback from experts in the field. We are now preparing similar reviews for spacecraft design, excavation and autonomy in the coming quarter as we dig into the various details at higher fidelity.

Our High Frontier mission and timeline should look like this [bracketed shows current primary assumption]:

Mid 2026 -> Integration of our payload onto the spacecraft, integration onto the [orbital transfer vehicle booster], integration into [SpaceX] rocket.

Late 2026 -> [SpaceX] Falcon 9 launch with direct Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) injection, boost into Heliocentric Orbit (where we orbit the sun and have left Earth's gravity well) post-separation by the [booster] vehicle, separation of our spacecraft into Karman+ control.

2-4 weeks -> Spacecraft commissioning and testing close to Earth, calibration of propulsion engines, calibration of cameras and navigation system, as well as communications systems by spacecraft flight operations team.

3-6 months -> Spacecraft cruise on its way to our target asteroid, pushing for autonomous systems to run in primary mode while keeping Earth operations as backup. We start with a full burn of our chemical propulsion system before switching to full electrical propulsion for cruise, across a distance of millions of kilometers.

2-4 weeks -> First light ('we can see our target with our on-board camera systems') at an expected distance of about [100,000] km to rendezvous and proximate operations (RPO) in which we characterize and assess the asteroid in great detail using our onboard systems to select optimal sites for our descent.

2-4 weeks -> In the Touch and Go (TAG) phase, we will run a number of descent operations to interact with the asteroid and excavate regolith. Starting from the most attractive location and moving to progressively more complicated and hazardous ones, we intend to test and run our excavation mechanisms as many times as possible to learn as much as possible. We want to explore different excavation solutions, fully autonomous TAG, interacting with rough surfaces and boulders and will keep doing this until the spacecraft breaks and gives up at some point.

Excavation
For excavation we have been focused on breaking rocks of progressively higher strength (projected rock strength for the C-type asteroids we are targeting is between 2 and 10 MPa, we are now able to consistently break and grind rock with strength of up to 20 MPa and will to push that higher. Part of the challenge here is that we have such a small sample of asteroids visited that behavior remains hard to predict, so we are adding significant redundancy and overcapacity.

Green Grinding Machine chewing through rocks

We have been working on progressively higher fidelity regolith simulant, starting from purely mechanical (visible in the photo above) modeled on Ryugu/C-type material and now expanding into chemical and magnetic as well. The idea of magnetic manipulation is being revisited after we ran a number of new tests and simulations and looks to be more feasible than originally expected.

Instruments
As we refine our excavation equipment, we will have a number of different slots for tests and analysis where we will be able to include specific sensors to allow us to determine some of the key indicators of chemical composition and water content that we are interested in from a surveying perspective.

As we have more capacity than we will need ourselves, we are going to run a call for proposals in the coming months where we invite teams (academia as well as industry) to propose a specific sensor/analysis/test they would like to run. We are aiming to include one or more of these instruments as hosted payloads.

Team & Ops

We brought on operational support and are expanding our flight software & autonomy team as well as our spacecraft and excavation teams at the moment with a range of open roles. We moved into temporary lab space at York Street Yards in Denver, while our own space is being built out around the corner.

With these things in place, we are building out the lab in the coming months for larger scale prototyping and testing as well as for the development of some of our flight hardware.

We are currently spending a lot of time on compliance and information security, both to ensure we follow the rigid export controls laws in the US as well as to qualify for government contracts in 2024.

Product Research

The upcoming data analysis about the Bennu sample will provide an interesting second datapoint about the composition of C-type asteroids, which we can use to refine our roadmap as well. Water is clearly available and more abundant than in Ryugu, which reinforces our focus on that initial usecase. We will be exploring water extraction from simulated regolith in the coming months as technology that will become essential down the line.

The clay minerals remain a core opportunity for orbital construction, while the consumables market (both in orbit and in the nascent activities around the moon) ensure massive growth in the coming years.

One part of the product portfolio that we will be spending more time on in the near term is our roadmap for several pieces of core technology that we are developing for our missions which have direct applications for others in the space ecosystem. From our autonomous navigation software to different ideas for fuel-less and fuel-efficient propulsion (essential for effective return trips), we see these development tracks including the various government support programs as opportunities for a dedicated product portfolio that we can leverage in the coming years.

We're also going to share and announce our work on space-based solar power which we included in our last update. With the broader momentum behind that idea in Europe and to a lesser extent the United States we want to make sure we anchor the use of asteroid regolith as one of the concepts to explore.

Update on Q3 Goals

Build 1:2 scale fully functional excavation prototype

Build test bed with regolith simulant - break rocks

Build & deliver asteroid target selection system v1

Run Mission 1 ConOps Review

Select major hardware vendors (+diligence & procurement)

Build launch provider shortlist (+diligence & procurement)

While we feel reasonably good about where we are with the various vendors, we have held off on committing formally as we run more diligence and push for better pricing. We are confident in both timelines and general survivability for our core partners.

Design autonomous flight software roadmap

Fit out and move into new headquarters/lab space

Identify and engage with prospective regolith customers

This has taken a backseat as many of the companies we would reach out to are in clear survival mode and unlikely to be interested in engaging. Rather than spend time here, we decided to focus on other revenue paths.