Design this Day | Episode 7

What it takes for squishy humans to survive in space.

In this special live episode, Design This Day host, Devin Liddell, is joined by Matt Ondler, Chief Strategy Officer at Axiom Space. Matt previously worked at NASA for 25 years where he led some of the agency's most ambitious projects in robotics, autonomy, and spacecraft systems. Now he's at Axiom, building the world's first commercial space station. Devin and Matt discuss how space might become an important manufacturing hub, the lengths Matt has gone to test something before launching it into orbit, and why squishy humans pose such a design challenge in space.

Devin Liddell: I'm a futurist at Teague. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the gap between present challenges and future solutions. I was elated to have Matt Ondler join us for a live recording at a party celebrating the launch of this podcast. We talked about how space might become an important manufacturing hub, the lengths Matt has gone to test something before launching it into orbit, and why squishy humans pose such a design challenge in space. Before we jump into the interview let's here from Matt about how he initially got interested in space?

Matt Ondler: So my origin story, and it's very similar to many people of my generation. I was six years old, summer of 1969, and I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and I didn't want to do anything else. I remember actually, it is a vivid memory watching on my parents' black and white television in 1443 East Third Street in Casper, Wyoming.

I remember having this feeling of anxiety that here we were putting a man in the moon and I'm stuck in the first grade. I thought that I had missed this greatest opportunity, but it really did set me on the trajectory of my life. I never really wanted to do anything else.

Devin Liddell: I also had the experience of feeling trapped in seventh grade, but it was not because of anything that was happening in space, it was just because of what was happening in middle school. A lot of us remember seventh grade. It's tough, it's tough years. When kids are watching launch events today, what do you think they're taking away from that experience? I mean, when you think about your experience being that first-grader and you fast-forward to kids now, what are they thinking about what's possible for them when it comes to the future of space?

Matt Ondler: And I got to see this or relive it recently. So in addition to building a commercial space station, we're building the next generation space suit for NASA, and along the way we're flying private astronauts to the International Space Station. We're about to fly our fourth mission, and most of those missions have turned out to be country astronauts. And so the particular example is in 2023, we flew two Saudi Arabian astronauts to the International Space Station. One of which was a woman, which is pretty remarkable for the country and the culture.

In addition to building a commercial space station, we're building the next generation space suit for NASA, and along the way we're flying private astronauts to the International Space Station.

Then I got to go back to Saudi Arabia about a month after the return and the entire conversation in the country was about women in the workforce, the importance of science and education and technology. And I'm positive that the day before she launched millions of little girls in that region saw the world a certain way, and then after seeing her launched, they suddenly saw the world bigger and the possibilities bigger. And then relating it back to me when I was six years old and was inspired, it was years later, I realized it was easy for me to have that dream because everybody on TV looked just like me.

Harder for women to have that dream, harder for people of color to have that dream. So I think space still is that thing that can get kids interested and inspire them still. It is hard to reach kids. When I was six years old, we only had three television channels, so it was on every channel, but I think space is still something that really inspires people and reaches people, and especially young people.

Devin Liddell: You touched on something that actually just now though, the fact that you only had three stations growing up in Casper, Wyoming. Three TV stations. Now kids are able to watch a lot more channels precisely because of advances in space technology. What are some other examples of things that we might take for granted about everyday life that are only possible because of space?

Matt Ondler: There are many. GPS is one of them. The space program really drove computing. There's really you can do in the world without a semiconductor, you probably can't even get water out of your tap. There's somewhere in the chain where there's a computer that controlled some valve that enabled you to get water out of the tap. But lots of examples in materials, in healthcare. While Velcro wasn't invented for the space program, it became really widely used. One of my favorite examples is probably everyone has a electric power drill or some tool at home.

Well, that traces its origin to a little contract that NASA gave to Black and Decker. They needed to be able to... During Apollo, they wanted to be able to drill into the lunar surface, and they needed something that was very compact and battery powered. And the technology that Black and Decker developed was this compact, very high torque, electric power drill that then turned into an entire industry, and every electric drill and electric tool can trace itself back to that little contract that NASA had.

Devin Liddell: I imagine there's things you cannot talk about in terms of what Axiom is up to, but I am curious to ask you what's the latest in terms of what Axiom is doing. Are there things you can share with us tonight?

Matt Ondler: So we're building the first space station.

Devin Liddell: Just that?

Matt Ondler: And the next spacesuit, and then we're about to fly our fourth mission and we'll fly Poland, Hungary, and India. All three of those countries have flown one astronaut before, all of them over 40 years ago with the Soviet Union. So the first time in nearly two generations that those countries have flown. And so it can be a huge impact for them as well.

Devin Liddell: Historically, countries have been in charge of building things for space. The International Space Station, also called the ISS, was built collaboratively by several countries and has housed a rotating international crew of astronauts for more than two decades. But the International Space Station is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2031, and NASA does not plan on building or maintaining the next space station. That's where a company like Axiom comes in. Matt says there are several reasons why a commercial space station makes sense.

What makes it a very exciting and world changing business is the things that you can make in space that you can't otherwise make on Earth.

Matt Ondler: What makes it a very exciting and world changing business is the things that you can make in space that you can't otherwise make on Earth. And I'll give you a few examples. And we've been flying some of these experiments with partners on these missions. One is for reasons I don't understand. Stem cells grow about 20 times faster in microgravity than they do on earth. And what that has allowed our partner at UC San Diego to do is they can do rapid drug discovery in a two weeks time period in orbit that might take them a year or over a year on the ground.

The other interesting thing about space is that in microgravity molecules go where they want to go. So a particular alloy is two times stronger if you make it in space. It'll be a while before we're making steel in space but there are things like retinal implants that you can make perfectly in space. We make them, we print them on earth, but you can't make them perfectly. It's sort of like trying to make a sand castle with dry sand. It slumps, but in microgravity surface tension is dominant, and so you can make perfect retinal implants.

We think that'll be one of the first applications. And then one of the exciting things Devin and I have talked about is because of that ability to 3D print biological material, you could potentially print entire organs. So there is some future in which you need a heart transplant, you send your DNA to a space station, your heart gets printed and then return to the ground and transplanted. So there's just a lot of exciting breakthroughs I think in the future utilizing that microgravity environment.

And the thing that's different now from NASA is NASA can do the experiment and they can do the prototype, but they don't have the charter to then go make a million of something or a thousand pounds of something. So you really need that commercial platform to be able to really commercialize that opportunity.

Devin Liddell: That's amazing. When you talk about the ISS, it is a human habitat. There's a lot of things that are probably outdated on the ISS. What are some things that the new Axiom station will have that represent a breakthrough that people who experienced the ISS did not have?

Matt Ondler: One of the things that when I met Teague and brought in Teague that we were interested in was if you ever see a picture of the inside of the International Space Station, it looks like a crazy person's garage. There's just shit everywhere, right? And it causes a very high cognitive load for the crew because there's just stuff everywhere and so hard to train and hard to do upgrades. And most of my career too, I didn't have a real appreciation for human-centric design.

Most of my life was just trying to get the damn thing to work. But we had this opportunity where we thought about the human-centric design and thought about we're going to have different kinds of humans in space.

Designing intuitive environments is essential if we're going to have more humans living and working in space.

Devin Liddell: Not all humans visiting space in the coming decades will be a trained astronaut. Companies are building reusable spacecraft, which is helping drive down the cost of space travel. It's still incredibly expensive, but already private wealthy individuals have a chance to experience space for themselves. Many will have some preparation, but nothing like the intensive training that astronauts go through today. Visiting scientists, researchers, and tourists will require interiors that are intuitive, not cramped quarters you'd need an engineering degree to navigate. Designing intuitive environments is essential if we're going to have more humans living and working in space.

Matt Ondler: So our station's going to be a lot cleaner, a lot more thoughtful about how humans interact with our station, a lot more aesthetically pleasing. And that fits into one of our business lines too, which is product placement and marketing for companies in that realm. And then probably the other important thing is that our life support system will be as regenerative as we can possibly make it. So recycling all the water, cleaning air. So try to minimize up mass. So the joke in the life support team is that yesterday's urine is today's coffee.

Devin Liddell: Starbucks if you're out there, there's something to go with there. When we spoke with John Conafay, John Conafay at Integrate was the first guest on Design This Day who's also involved in space, and he talked about that one of the difficulties in terms of working in the space industry is mitigating risk, especially through the lens of that there's just no way to truly, truly in a foolproof, bulletproof way test things eventually. And this is his phrase, but I'm going to revel in it, that you just have to fuck it, fly it.

You have to go for it. So I'm curious from your vantage point, how have you navigated that challenge? That seems like a significant challenge when you think about there's millions and millions and millions of dollars in play here.

Matt Ondler: It keeps you up at night because there will be a lot of things that will see the space environment for the first time after we've launched them. And the difficulty about space is you don't get a chance to go get it back when it didn't quite work. So there are several examples. So just to explain the environment, lower earth orbit's only 250 miles above the surface, but there's no atmosphere, very, very little atmosphere. So incredibly high vacuum. The temperature extremes are quite extreme. So if the sun is on one side of the spacecraft, that side of the spacecraft is about plus 250 degrees.

The side that's in the shadow is minus 250 degrees. That includes, by the way, a person in a spacesuit. So chest to the sun is plus 250, back that's in shadows minus 250. So extreme environments. Now, we can duplicate those sorts of things on earth, but they require special facilities. It's hard to put an entire spacecraft in a vacuum chamber. The other environmental fact is that we're traveling 17,000 miles an hour, hard to duplicate that on the earth. And then the radiation environment is different as well. So we have to do special testing on all the electronics to make sure that it works in that environment.

But then ultimately you still get there and many things will be the first time you see it. I'll give you one example of testing we did way back on the International Space Station. The International Space Station has GPS antennas on it. It was one of the first GPS applications in space. And this is in the days when no one had a smartphone and GPS wasn't everywhere. And Honeywell had built a box, a GPS receiver that was used on aircraft and was highly successful. And so we went and got that box and figured, "Well, it's working on these aircraft, so it'll probably work in space."

And the problem was that it's 17,000 miles an hour, you're traversing and changing the GPS constellation so fast that the software wasn't designed to do that, and it didn't actually work. Fortunately, we had a very, very expensive GPS simulator in which we found that out. Otherwise, we would've found out in space.

Devin Liddell: So how did you do that? I think you told me you tested that in a pickup truck.

Matt Ondler: We naively drove it around in a pickup truck thinking that was a good test, but it wasn't fast enough.

Devin Liddell: I have a teen driver, he's 17 years old, and I believe based on personal experience, he drives at 17,000 miles an hour. I'm pretty sure that's the case. So I might enlist him as a recruit here. Designing for humans in space, you touched on it quite a bit already. Is there anything else that would be surprising for people in terms of understanding the challenges of designing for just humans in space?

Matt Ondler: And humans in space is actually the hard thing. Lots of companies and countries launched things to space. So far, the only entities that have put humans in space for the long haul are countries, the US, the Russians, and now the Chinese. The fourth entity that will put humans in space for the long haul is Axiom Space. So that's a pretty tough act to follow. And by long term, I mean not a SpaceX flight in which it's a very short term and all the life support is really consumed. It's consumables. Because we'll have crews there for six months to a year, we have to recycle and have a regenerative life support system.

Humans in space is actually the hard thing. Lots of companies and countries launched things to space. So far, the only entities that have put humans in space for the long haul are countries, the US, the Russians, and now the Chinese.

The challenge really is humans. We tend to need oxygen and food and water, and we operate in a very narrow temperature and pressure range. We outcast things that are hazardous to ourselves in a closed environment. So we have to monitor for those. So it's a difficult thing to keep humans in space. I'll give you another example of challenge. For our spacesuit, one of the places that NASA wants to return is the south pole of the moon. And at the south pole, the sun is at a very low angle. And what that means is that there are many craters that are permanently shadowed. The reason NASA is interested in that, in these permanently shadowed regions, there might be ice. And if there's ice, then you can make water. And if you have water, you can crack the water into oxygen and hydrogen and you can do all kinds of things with it. The problem is the surface of that crater hasn't seen the sun for 4 billion years. So the surface is near absolute zero. So minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Human foot about an inch away from that, likes to be at about 98 degrees and only about an inch difference there. So designing that just the sole of the boot is quite an engineering challenge.

Similarly, if a crewman is using a hammer or chisel to do some geology on the moon and they set that down in this permanently shadow place, it's going to get really, really cold very quickly, and then they pick it up. It could be quite hazardous. So just a few examples of how hard it is with these squishy humans.

Devin Liddell: Devil's advocate, by the way. So we're talking about the challenges of putting humans in space. So we are making some great advances in humanoids robots. Why not just put robots in space?

Matt Ondler: So I love this question. So one of my last jobs at NASA was running the robotics group at the Johnson Space Center, and we built electric autonomous vehicles, but we also built humanoid robots. One was Robonaut 2 that we flew to the International Space Station. It was mostly an upper body and it had these really creepy leg things. And then we built a fully humanoid robot called Valkyrie, and we did that all at the Johnson Space Center, which is the center of human space flight. It's where all the NASA astronauts are housed. So it was sometimes challenging; we'd get that question a lot.

And the answer was always, it's really humans and robots. There are things that robots do really well and things that humans do really well. And really for exploration missions like to the Moon and Mars, there won't always be humans there, and you still want to get work done. And so having a robot is handy to have, and having a humanoid robot allows you to use the same tools, the same interfaces that the human does, and not have to send up separate tools. That's not always the case. Someday you'll buy a home humanoid robot, you won't have it wash the dishes, you'll still use the dishwasher because it's just a better form.

The first thing you learn building a humanoid robot is how remarkable humans are. 

But I think we're a little ways from that still. The first thing you learn building a humanoid robot is how remarkable humans are. We are really remarkable. A human hand has about 25 to 26 degrees of freedom, meaning that you can move it in 25 or 26 ways. So we still have ways to go with humanoids, but the future is going to be lots of robots and our station will have little inspection robots that we can send outside and look for things and then hopefully a humanoid at some point as well.

Devin Liddell: That's amazing. We, I believe, have some time to open it up to a few questions. One question we got from the audience was what space companies are doing about the Kessler syndrome? The Kessler syndrome is a potential scenario where space junk keeps building up in Earth's orbit and some zones become too dangerous for humans to use. That's because even the tiniest of objects can cause serious damage if they crash into satellites or other human made structures in space.

Matt Ondler: That's a great question. So space debris is a real problem, and space sustainability is kind of the buzz phrase now. We really need to do better at sort of policing it and making sure that people who are launching thousands of satellites are making sure that they're taking care of that. So on our station, the entire station will be covered by a micro meteorite shield. And NASA figured out that what happens is when a micro meteorite strikes or a piece of debris strikes, it will vaporize when it hits that layer and then it won't have enough energy to penetrate. But orbital debris is a huge problem.

So about two to three times a year, the defense Department that tracks, they claim an object about the size of a Coke can, they probably track objects even smaller. They will call up NASA and say, "Three days from now, there's going to be this object that's going to come close to the International Space Station." And then NASA raises the orbit or they do a maneuver to avoid that. We will also subscribe to that service. The government hasn't actually figured out how they're going to do that with the commercial, but we'll probably have to do two or three debris avoidance maneuvers every year and then just have to protect for some of these strikes.

I'll tell you a fun fact story is that we returned to space shuttle on a mission and notice one of the outer pans of the window was damaged. And from forensics analysis, it was determined that that damage came from a fleck of paint that came off a satellite. Now the fleck of paint hit the orbiter at a relative speed of seven miles a second. So that take a very big object because the velocities are really big, but orbital debris is something that as a global community we need to manage. And there's lots of folks that have ideas on how you go catch it and big nets and things like that, but nothing has really emerged that's very practical yet.

Devin Liddell: All right, we've got time for one more. All right. Right here I see. This question was about whether there are plans to create multiple space stations that would enable humans to travel even farther, past the moon and onwards to Mars.

Matt Ondler: I think 15 to 20 years from now, we're going to be surrounded by objects that we can't imagine how we live without that were made in space. If we're right about that there's going to be lots of space stations and lots of people building them to make those things. And then what has happened in human history is that humans always go where the resources are. Every great city in the world is built around some fertile plane, some deep water port, some access to a river. We're going to do the same thing as we explore the solar system. So Low Earth Orbit has an amazing resource. It's called Microgravity and High Vacuum.
So we're going to go up there and take advantage of that. There'll be resources that we discover on the moon. There's already resources on the moon, so we'll build habitats and cities to take advantage of those resources. And then as we go on to Mars and other places, we'll figure out what's valuable to do there and what resources that we can use to make things and keep going out into the cosmos.

Devin Liddell: John Barratt, thank you so much for bringing us on. A big round of applause for Matt Ondler. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. We have some really exciting guests coming up. I can't wait to share more with you next time. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at Teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com.