Navigating the shift to commercial space stations 

Time Markers

00:00 – Episode introduction
00:24 – Welcome
00:42 – A pivotal time for the ISS
03:37 – What about future space science
05:45 – A new market and controls
07:02- Gaten’s history
08:27 – The China factor
10:35 – On sustainability
12:53 – On safety
14:49 – Regulations and public perception
16:17 – Commercial options and diversification
18:51 – A new ecosystem
21:41 – On innovation
23:31 – The retirement of the ISS
25:47 – Q&A

Transcript – Robyn Gatens Conversation

David Ariosto – Robyn Gatens, thanks so much for joining us. I’m going to make sure I get your title right, because everyone seems to have very, very long titles right now. But you are the director of the International Space Station for space operations, director of the commercial space flight division, acting Correct, right? Yeah, I can’t think of a more pivotal time for the ISS, at least in recent memory as right now, not least of which, because you have some competition, you have all these new sort of emerging commercial space stations, and you have geopolitical competition in Hong Kong. And I’m just wondering what, what is that like right now, in terms of the the nature of operations, the fact that you have this, this retirement coming up by 2030 and you have all this sort of new landscape that’s emerging in Leo, it’s really busy time, really exciting time. I don’t like to think of it as a competition between the International Space Station and the follow on commercial space station. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a transition plan that we have actually at NASA. So it’s always been our plan. Station wasn’t designed to last forever, to retire it, and then transition to be a Has, has started to adopt that more of client base than the architecture that it used to be developing. And so I wonder, in that context, where are the pitfalls, where the opportunities? What do you, what do you see as sort of the go between in terms of this transition period?

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, well, really, it’s that shift. We’ve been operating station. It’s government owned and operated platform for decades now, but we brought industry along with us. We have a whole host of commercial service providers with hardware on station. They bring customers to we have commercial transportation providers and and so that last pieces is turning over the platform itself to be owned and operated by a commercial entity. So it’s that shift in paradigm to bring industry along with us. They’re now very good at doing things in low Earth orbit and building those kinds of capabilities. So it’s time for government to step away and let them do that, and then, and then we go do the next hard thing, which is, you know, Moon to Mars, and while we maintain what we want to do in low Earth orbit, hopefully more cost effectively.

David Ariosto – I mean, that strikes me sort of. The plan, in many ways, is that government sets these markers. Private industry catches up, if it can, maybe with a little bit of encouragement from the government, the next marker is set. I wonder, though I wonder, in that context, whether there is danger in the context I can play devil’s advocate a little bit here, but clearly in the realms of pharmacology and some of this really new fangled research that you can do in low Earth orbit, having that competition that’s driven by commercial sector, you’re only going to see gains, I would imagine. I wonder, though, if there are questions of the loss, though, on the science for science sake side of the equation in which there is not clear cut bottom lines to the nature of science. I’m maybe referring to some of the quantum sensing applications that you already have on ISS, although even that has a commercial component to it, in terms of cold quanta out of Colorado. But do you see where I’m going with us, though, like the nature of things that don’t necessarily have a market to to them, but may, 10 to 15, years out.

Robyn Gatens – Well we still have a role as a government to do that fundamental science. And we work with our partners and National Science Foundations, National Institutes of Health, who are now doing, you know, work on the space station in those fundamental science areas, as well as NASA, so I do believe that’s the role of the government, and will continue to be, to keep pursuing those lines of research, but while also playing a role in helping to incubate these commercial applications, and that’s been a tricky place to be, because we don’t know exactly when to pull back and how far to help. Right? Is it when the company makes its first dollar? Probably not, but at some point we want you know to these things, to graduate from the government subsidy, but we’re trying to play that role as well. So it’s both I’d say.

David Ariosto – It also strikes me as a lot of the folks that are divining these new companies, or that are joining the ranks of them, have some of that old NASA DNA in them. So there’s almost this symbiosis, this kind of new fangled environment, which you have those who have worked within the confines of the agency and sort of understand the operational tempo and how things are done. And now one kind of branch out and do things, do their own, their own new things. And I wonder, I wonder, there are opportunities there, and there are also maybe a little bit of a lack of control in terms of how that market develops.

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, true. We’re and we’re trying not to control it too much. We’re trying to enable, well, we we definitely have goals that we want to pursue in low Earth orbit, so we want these capabilities that will achieve our goals beyond that, what they do with them? We’re trying not to control that, and we’re trying to, we know we’re going to have our government astronauts there. There will be private astronauts there, you know, let’s, you know, we probably need to be careful about what goes on while our government astronauts are there. But, you know, to the extent we can not have as many requirements, you know, is what we’re trying to do.

David Ariosto – Well, I want to get into the commercial space flight side of things as well. But before we do, I kind of want to get back into a little bit of your, your own history, yeah, because you, you started down in Huntsville.

Robyn Gatens – I did 27 years. Yeah, 1985 came out of school and ended up in Huntsville, got a job with NASA, initially in propulsion. Yeah, hated it. Why? I think it was more the work I was given to do. I was, I was handed the computer model for the space shuttle main engine, and just said, here, this is yours now, right? And it just was boring. There wasn’t anything to do. Plus, then challenger happened, yeah, shortly after that, and all of the leadership and propulsion area left on tiger teams, and so young people like myself or were left kind of twiddling our phones. I was a chemical engineer. I am a chemical engineer. And there was this fledgling group that had just won the job for the Space Station Freedom habitat, which include the life support system and a life life support systems is a great fit for a chemical engineer. So I found that group transferred over and never looked back. And that’s been that was kind of my technical specialty. What about my career?

David Ariosto – I bring it up not not only because of, sort of the, you know, the technologies that were coming up, and of which there are many, ISS would probably have too many discoveries to mention in terms of, you know, how much, how much earth science has been applicable, not only in terms of that, but just in terms of climate science and overseeing the planet and various natures of collaboration. But it was a very different time as well, right? You didn’t have that sort of maturing commercial industry the way we do now, and yet, we also were in the throes of a Cold War, and I wonder, in the context of that, because we have, we being in the United States, have now sort of a chief rival in space, maybe perhaps, much like we did during the first Cold War, whether there are opportunities there to kind of push the envelope in ways that you know, maybe Germany the beginnings of the kind of Apollo mindset, in a way, or whether or not, because this is more of a sustainable play, whether or not you see dangers there in terms of maybe the lack of collaboration. You have Tiangong that’s operating in low Earth orbit right now. You have other plans in terms of the International lunar research station on the moon. So you almost have these two parallel efforts that are happening simultaneously, and it has these little trappings of those old Cold War mindsets that inhabit it at very much the same time that you were getting to the space industry.

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, that’s true. It is sort of same game, different players right now. I think Mike gold spoke to it very well in a session earlier today on on that rivalry that we’re setting up and the new space race, right? And I think that does kind of light a fire under us, right? We, we can’t wait. We’ve got to keep going, and we’ve got to maintain this capability that we have in low Earth orbit and not lose it, right? We built all this capability. It took us decades to build this capability on station, and let’s not settle for something less than that going forward.

David Ariosto – Well, what are the let’s paint this picture a little bit. What are some of the stakes? You use the term space race? This, I think there’s a concern amongst some that I’ve spoken to of you know, is this a flags and footprints type of mindset and stratagem somewhat akin to what we saw during the Apollo program? There are exceptions in terms of how that’s characterized. I acknowledge, or is this truly a broader sustainability play, and in the absence of sustained financial support for the very agencies that have sort of brought us here? Yes, we have this commercial push. But do you worry there in terms of you know, maybe the fickle nature of space policy over the years, which certainly has been maybe an Achilles heel of both human space flight and the sort of broader initiatives that we’ve had.

Robyn Gatens – Yeah. I mean, we want to do it all right. We want to be in low Earth orbit. We want to go to the moon. We want to go on to Mars. Do we have the resources to do all of that? One of the reasons our strategy in low Earth orbit is is, what it is, is to try to free up resources so we can go to those, do those other things. We think we can maintain our footprint in low Earth orbit very well with maybe less than we’re spending today on the government owned and operated model. Sure, that’s at least our hope. And so I think you need all of it. You need low Earth orbit is definitely part of the exploration continuum, the most cost effective place to test out and do the human research and test the technologies such as life. So. Support systems that we’re going to need for long duration missions in microgravity is the low Earth orbit platform. We’re not going to have continuous presence on on the lunar surface to do it there, or the lunar orbit to do it there. Low Earth orbit is really the best place to do it. So we need it for those reasons. We also want to do the fundamental science. We also want to enable the commercial applications and all of those benefits. So we got a lot of whys for being in the low Earth orbit continuously and permanently.

David Ariosto – Yeah. I’m jumping around a little bit here, but I only go back to this because you mentioned it in a couple answers ago, but you mentioned Challenger and commercial space flight really hasn’t had a kind of situation like that. But when you talk to different people in the industry, just the sheer nature of, you know, the growth of human space flight, they, you know, they fear that it will at some point, these things are not, not foolproof. And I wonder, in the context of the impacts the Challenger had and the impact that Columbia had years later in 2003 and how that sort of shifted much of the existing trajectory, but also political wherewithal, whether or not the commercial side is a different game when you when you consider that, and whether there’s this, this wherewithal that can endure the nature of what is inherently a very dangerous proposition.

Robyn Gatens – Well, that’s why, you know we have, you know, our human rating requirements. We want to make sure before we send our astronauts to a destination or on a commercial vehicle, that they’ve satisfied our requirements. And we’ve, we’ve, you know, we’ve signed off on the risk involved, right? And we have a certain amount of oversight and insight in order to do that with these contracts, we’re trying to, you know, progress you know, to, you know, hey, you know, vendors have been working at this for a while. Maybe, you know, we, we pull back, and we don’t have to look at every piece of paper, and we don’t have to do every, everything that we, you know, like to do as NASA, you know, but, but that’s a process. And I think the more experience these commercial companies get at flying, the more you know we can relax. Some of that insight.

David Ariosto – It’s an interesting that took an interesting paradigm, right? Because if you adopt this mindset, this iterative mindset of this and move fast and break things, that’s fine for robotic landers, and that’s fine for for rocket launches, the math changes considerably when human lives are involved, and you’re going to have more and more people operating, not only in Leo, but perhaps beyond that, in terms of some of these, these proposed permanent fixtures that we have in cislunar space and the moon one day Mars. And I just, I wonder, in terms of how that, how that shapes in terms of the regulatory framework, in terms of the public perception, in terms of, you know, the nature of federal tax dollars. Because, you know, inevitably, these things, even though they are commercial, they still rely heavily on on Joe and Jill taxpayer So, like all this sort of plays into this, this, this mindset that that’s not that dissimilar from from those days in ’86 and 2003.

Robyn Gatens – Mm, hmm, yeah, the regulatory framework, you know, we’re, we’ll have to, we’ll have to catch up until then NASA’s got to kind of carry that ball, right? And we are. We take more risk with things like our cargo missions, we don’t do nearly as much oversight as we do with our crew mission. So there is a difference there. Like I said, I think, I think we’re going to have to get comfortable with the right level on these future commercial platforms as well.

David Ariosto – I want to talk about in terms of the other side, commercial space that, which we’ve kind of touched on quite a bit now, but the nature of the diversification of options that that NASA has been hoping, right? There’s been a desire for not just the singular reliance on Dragon capsule through through SpaceX. We’re not there yet, right? The star liners close, right? But we’re not, we’re not quite there yet. And so it’s, it still has that, that singular focus, unless we’re talking about Russian Soyuz at this point. So, you know, what? What concerns do you have when it comes to that? Or is this just a sort of a wait and see and, see and we’ll, you know, we’d have to wait for the commercial sector to kind of mature, to kind of get us there.

Robyn Gatens – We always want multiple providers. We like competition. We like redundancy. And so, you know, it bothers us to have only one provider to rely on. We really want. Get Starliner flying as soon as we can, and we want that’s why we want multiple destinations to go to as well. We want multiple transportation providers and multiple destinations. You know, we have different kinds of transportation we need. We need, obviously, crew, but we also need cargo, and we need cargo up and down. Sometimes people don’t really realize it’s, it’s a mixture of capabilities, and not all solutions can do all of those things. So we’d like to have a portfolio of options. It’s the trick is really, how do we keep what we you know, a robust transportation and platform provider ecosystem. How do we as a government support that on on the resources that we have? How do we what is the what is the end state we want, in low Earth orbit? Well, it’s a platform. It’s healthy transportation, and it’s a user. It’s users who are going to use this right? If we, if we look at that end state, and we, we, we come back to today, and what are the decisions we’re making today that help us achieve that end state? You know, we want to keep healthy transportation going. We want to make sure we fly Starliner and these other new vehicles, because we want them around for the future. So those are kinds of things that we’re trying to think about and grapple with.

David Ariosto – I’ve heard it described as from like kilobytes to kilograms in terms of the data transfer, in terms of the sheer mass desirability, in terms of those burgeoning supply chains. But to that point, I mean, ISS is kind of like the old guard in a way. In low Earth orbit, there have been stewards in a real estate market that hasn’t had all that much in the way of a neighborhood, and that has changed dramatically now. And I think the thing that I’ve noticed is the emphasis on data, on processing in terms of, you know, new AI driven systems that that sort of recognize bottlenecks that exist on orbit. And maybe you don’t necessarily need ground stations in the same kind of way, long term, you know, the development of things like lasers and free space optics and all of these different machinations of technologies and players, be they geopolitical or nonprofits and students and companies. And so you have this whole new ecosystem. A lot of it centers on data, though, and I wonder, in that context, does that sort of take us to the to a different place, both vis a vis this burgeoning AI revolution that we have here, and the cooling requirements and the energy requirements of of that that apparatus, but more broadly speaking, you know, who dominates or who influences low Earth orbit would suggest to influence a lot of what’s happening on Earth? I threw a lot at you.

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, you threw a lot at me. I thought you were going one way, and you zagged another way. Yeah. On the data piece we are seeing that, you know, evolve to, let’s do, let’s, let’s not send all our data back to Earth for analysis. Let’s, let’s do more computing at the source and and use AI and other tools our researchers that’s going to benefit them greatly. Right now, our model, with the old guard ISS, is send up an experiment, and you do your run, and then you return it, and you look at what you got and and then you go again. And that’s very slow, you know? And so, how do we speed up the pace of research? How do we allow more on orbit, iterative research? What are those tools? It’s not just the ability to compute in space, but also other analytical tools you want, kind of your whole lab up there, your prepare my sample and do my run and then look at it over in the scanning electron microscope and see what I got and go again. So all of those things together, I think, are exciting, and where we want to move towards new capabilities on these new platforms.

David Ariosto – And I think that is really the question at its core, because when you think about commercial development like, yes, you have all this innovation. Yes, you have this new tempo of operational capacity. And yet a lot of that also relies on the research being done, oftentimes by government scientists. And so long term, when you think about this paradigm shift, does that? Does that get us to it to a sort of a new kind of ecosystem in Leo, while raising questions about long term viability of the pure science, for science sake, research that’s going to require. That funding from Washington that may or may not be becoming, you know, it’s, I think it’s a long term question that particularly our geopolitical rivals, have considered quite a bit.

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, I think we’re going to move away from just government astronauts doing all the science. We’re going to have citizen scientists up there. We’re all already exploring that capability with our suborbital vehicles to fly, you know, government sponsored, but citizens, you know, doing science. So that that makes complete sense. And we could have, we could have, you know, private citizens doing government science for us too. We don’t always have to have our government astronauts be the ones doing it. We do want government astronauts flying in low Earth orbit. That is one of our goals. We want to maintain those skills. We want to maintain doing joint missions with our international partners to prepare us for going again exploration beyond low Earth orbit. So we definitely do want to maintain a government astronaut presence, but it’s going to be, it’s going to expand beyond that.

David Ariosto – All right, last question, then we’re going to go to some audience questions here. But is this, you have a, I don’t know, is there a certain sort of nostalgia that that’s that’s associated with it. As you as you see through the the calendar ticking down to 2030 and what, you know, yes, there’s this excitement surrounding everything that’s happening in terms of the commercial sector that you’ve discussed, but there is, there is this question mark of you know, what’s being left as as this thing retires.

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, of course, I’ve worked on this thing pretty much my whole career, in different forms, redesigned seven times, you know, changed names, but always, always the space station. What an incredible honor, by the way, to have been able to do that. A lot of people never see their project fly, and I’ve been able to see it fly and flourish for all this time. So yeah, it’s a it will be very bittersweet to see the end of that legacy. What I’m really focused on is, is trying to make sure that that legacy that we leave is the best one possible. Can we get everything we possibly can out of this platform? You know, I, I coined the phrase The decade of results. We spent the first decade really assembling the station, and then the second decade maturing the capabilities and adding to them, are really practicing and figuring out how to how to use the capabilities, and now just you know the number of publications, you know the number of for over 4000 projects, top tier journals, you know just the the impact that’s coming out of the research and cancer research and disease and and and these applications. And I think it’s just, it is, you know, it is finally having the impact it was always intended to. And so I, I really want to get all the juice we can out of it. And then, yes, it’s going to be a bittersweet day, but then we have, you know, the future to look forward to. All

David Ariosto – All right, Robyn Gatens seems like a good place to leave it. We can go to the audience now for some questions. If you want to pass the mic around, if anyone has any.

Glenn Martin – My name is Glenn Martin. I was a designer on the starboard one and port one segments at McDonnell Douglas down in Huntington Beach in the early 90s. I’ll note that a lot of the commercial space stations are very focused upon pressurized modules for IVA activities. And I know a lot of the science that we were looking at early days in the design period was Express pallets, external payloads for science on the pre integrated truss on the spine of the space station. I wondered if any of the commercial stations that are in the running are going to have anything near the ISS capabilities in the mind of NASA, and is that something you’re actually setting specifications for?

Robyn Gatens – Yeah, good question. We do have a whole host of external payloads on ISS and and those have been, you know, had have been tremendously successful and returned great results, anything from Earth science to astrophysics and you name it. Yes, many of the commercial space station concepts are planning for externals. It’s. Large capability to add, because you have to have the ability to all the robotics that come with that. You have to have the ability to deploy and then retrieve those instruments. So it’s not a trivial capability. And for that reason, we chose not to explicitly require externals. We are very interested in those proposals and and getting pricing, if you will, on those options, and are very interested in using them if available, but we’re not necessarily demanding and driving that that capability.

David Ariosto – Great. Anyone else? All right? Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was a pleasure.

Robyn Gatens – All right, thanks.