Can-do spirit accelerates
At SpaceCom event, former NASA employees say they’re finding ways to develop products faster
Since leaving their jobs at NASA to venture into private enterprise, employees at Intuitive Machines say they have accelerated their pace of innovation.
Their products, showcased at the SpaceCom event in downtown Houston, include an unmanned drone and a vehicle about the size of a golf bag designed to quickly return experiments from the International Space Station.
The speed at which they’ve been able to develop products would have been unthinkable inside the large government agency, said Beth Fischer, vice president of operations for the 2-year-old Clear Lake-based company.
“When you can take an idea and have a product in your hands in 90 days, it’s pretty amazing,” she said Wednesday.
This can-do spirit was typical at the inaugural Space Commerce Conference and Exposition, which ends Thursday at the George R. Brown Convention Cen-
ter downtown. More than 1,600 people are attending the three-day event from a variety of industries, including aerospace, energy, medical, satellite and communications, maritime and advanced manufacturing. All seem committed to finding the best the public and the private sectors have to offer.
“We feel very confident that everyone will leave with at least one or two actionable items that will benefit themselves and their businesses,” James Causey, executive director of SpaceCom, said during opening remarks Tuesday.
The expo highlights a wide variety of technologies, from valves and connectors to a single-person spacecraft.
Attendees also met former astronaut and author Col. Rick Searfoss and posed for photos in an Orlan spacesuit used to train Russian cosmonauts.
Fischer said the group that started Intuitive Machines saw opportunity in the commercial arena to develop technology more quickly while utilizing their NASA experience to solve problems in the aerospace, energy and medical industries.
Intuitive Machines also will be one of the early tenants in a cluster of aerospace companies viewed as the first step toward building the Houston Spaceport at Ellington Airport.
“When you open the doors to people to be innovative, it’s amazing what can happen,” Fischer said.
Other local SpaceCom exhibitors include Stafford-based Atec, which has been working in space since the 1960s. A display in its booth highlighted the company’s cryogenic fuel-control valves for the RL10 rocket engine. The valves have been used in 115 launches.
The combustion that propels rockets forward is created by combining liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. These valves, designed to work in extreme cold, keep the supercooled liquids separate until they’re meant to be blended at the nozzle for combustion.
Right now, the end users for most of Atec’s space products are NASA and the Air Force. In five to 10 years, CEO Howard Lederer expects some of those end users to come from outside government.
The Houston Spaceport also had an exhibit. Arturo Machuca, general manager of Ellington Airport and the spaceport, said many companies expressed an interest in being part of the development.
But exhibitors weren’t limited to Houston. Lanham, Md.-based Genesis Engineering Solutions showcased its single-person spacecraft that doesn’t require an astronaut to wear a bulky spacesuit. This eliminates the need for pre-breathing, where astronauts wash excess nitrogen from their bodies in order to avoid decompression sickness, known as the bends.
This spacecraft, which can be piloted or controlled remotely, has robotic arms that can have different attachments for drilling, cutting or other tasks. It could potentially be used for repairs around the International Space Station or in future trips as NASA works to get humans on an asteroid and on Mars.
On the research front, Houston-based Alpha Space Test and Research Alliance will attach a container to the outside of the space station in 2017. People can buy space in this container to test materials, such as paint, glass coatings or plastics, to see how they hold up in the intense environment.
This is useful for products that will ultimately be used in space, but it’s also useful for earthbound products by accelerating tests that would take longer in a lab on Earth.
“You don’t have to be a NASA scientist to put your stuff in space to test it anymore,” said Stephanie Murphy, president of Alpha Space.
The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, CASIS, was also educating people about research opportunities. CASIS manages the U.S. National Laboratory on the space station. Since 2011, it has put more than 100 projects on the orbiting facility. It expects to do roughly the same volume in the next year alone, spokesman Patrick O’Neill said.
“We really want people to think of ISS as a laboratory, not as a once-in-alifetime thing that you get something there,” Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa said. “You can actually try something out, get it back, look at the results, work on the next generation just as you would in a laboratory here on Earth, but doing things you cannot do on Earth because of the environment that it’s in.”