Our theme in the last couple of months has been vertical integration. Our original (pretty naive) assumption was that the massive expansion of activity in space had created a somewhat reliable base of components that we could use for missions. We knew that most of that was developed for low Earth orbit, but felt that this would be a good base to work from even if a deep space mission requires some additional performance.
What we found is that some components are there, including performance ratings in line with what we need. There are gaps for sure, which we knew and had already planned to develop and qualify on our own. We were looking to buy products 'off the shelf', but it turns out there really are no products and there is no shelf.
Vendors would provide price quotes for parts in their catalogue, generally already at a level that made no sense to us. When asking for an actual proposal, you find out that the price is not the price at all. Every proposal we receive has a line item sold as 'we need this to make sure your part meets all of your requirements' that is called NRE (non-recurring engineering). In most cases, this is the work that needs to be done to actually design and qualify the part or product that they are trying to sell you as though it already exists. And usually, NRE exceeds price by 2-3x....
Which brings us back to vertical integration. For every rabbit hole that we've gone down recently, it turns out that the individual inputs are available for a fraction (1/100 to 1/1000) of a 'price+NRE' proposal. This allows us to design and build ourselves, which helps drive down cost massively while ensuring that we control quality and performance.
A recent blog by Casey Handmer highlights some of these issues and challenges in the context of NASA and its prime contractors. Well worth a read!
After that rant about NRE, we wanted to jump to a more positive topic. The image above is from the Polaris Dawn mission that SpaceX was able to successfully run last month. A privately funded spacecraft with 4 astronauts in it hit the highest manned altitude since the Apollo program at 1,408 km above Earth's surface. They also completed an extravehicular activity (EVA) which frankly looks awesome.
High Frontier Mission Update
Our primary mission objective is:
To rendezvous with an uncharacterized near-Earth Asteroid and showcase capturing regolith at kilogram scale, minimizing mission duration and cost.
We remain on track for our scheduled launch in 2026 and are preparing for our preliminary design review (PDR) later in October. As we continue work on this mission which is intended to verify and stress test the performance of our mining technology, we have also started looking at our first customer missions after High Frontier.
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