Four rooms, earth view.
Sounds far-fetched at the moment, doesn't it?
But you know we may be seeing ads like this
in the not too distant future.
Living away from earth
has always captured our imagination.
As well as providing the basics for survival,
these ideas are a symbol
of humankind's unique creativity and ambition.
This advanced base, or space station,
will be headquarters for the final ascent to the moon.
Today the idea of multiple outposts
where we can live and work in space has never seemed closer.
We're gonna fly.
It's about making our lives the best we can make it.
It's about as a species having a path for our future.
And the mission to create these habitats
is well underway as private companies get ready
to take that next giant leap.
The International Space Station.
It's the only space habitat we have.
One of the first places they take you in the ISS
is the cupola so you can finally look at the Earth
in all its beauty.
I don't care who you are, it's always stunning,
it's shocking, it's amazing, because that's the view
you've been waiting for your entire life.
It passes over 90% of the world's population
without most of us ever realizing.
And, at an estimated cost of a $150 billion,
it's the most expensive object we've ever built.
You think about the Sistine Chapel, the pyramids,
and the Burj Khalifa or take your pick.
I mean it far outstrips those.
It's the one and only non-terrestrial human outpost.
We've had a constant human footprint
in orbit for almost 20 years
because of the International Space Station.
The collaboration between 15 countries
started construction in 1998 and was pieced together
in space over the course of a decade.
Since 2000 it's been a permanently
crude research laboratory.
A space habitat that's allowed humankind to live,
manufacture, and explore beyond Earth.
The overarching achievement
of the space station has been education.
It has educated us about how to do research.
It's educated us about how to live.
It's educated us about the harshness of the environment
that it is in.
And it's about learning, I think.
People say what was one of your favorite parts
about being up there?
Hands down, floating everywhere I went.
Bbut your first impressions for ISS certainly is,
it's how big it is.
The ISS is the size
of an American football field with most of that footprint
taken up by eight solar arrays.
These provide enough energy to power 40 homes.
The station has an American side and a Russian side
as well as contributions from other nations
like Canada, Japan, and the European Union.
Astronauts on board can pass freely between these sections.
Their living and working areas are made up of modules,
each 4.2 meters in diameter.
And in total, they have the same volume as a Boeing 747.
The three main labs, Destiny, Hope, and Columbus,
are conducting up to 600 ongoing experiments
at any one time.
And while it's been a collaboration
between governments to build and maintain the ISS,
its next chapter will rely more on private enterprise.
Today's a very remarkable day.
NASA is opening the International Space Station
to commercial opportunities
and marketing these opportunities
as we've never done before.
Managing and maintaining the ISS
costs $3.4 billion a year.
That's over half NASA's space operations budget.
Aging hardware and space debris will only add to these costs
which is why NASA is now hoping to pass some responsibility
for the station over to commercial companies.
We would like to see a robust commercial marketplace
in low earth orbit where space stations exist
outside of NASA.
The goal being that NASA could be a customer.
And we want to have numerous providers
that are competing against each other
on cost and innovation.
Keep your rut, and--
With federal funding proposed to stop in 2025,
opening the station to private enterprise
would free up resources for the space agency's ambitions
to return to the moon and journey to Mars.
Transferring to a more commercial model
is allowing industry to take over many of those areas
that NASA has traditionally been responsible for.
Like the design, and operations,
and maintenance of space systems.
But the most exciting part, I think, is new opportunities.
The iPhones would have never come
from the government, for instance.
The base technology came from the government,
but the way it's used, the way it interacts with consumers,
governments aren't really built for that.
So I think that'll be exciting to see how private industry
uses the same technology or the same systems
but then use them in a different way.
Every NASA achievement
has been the collaborative achievement of NASA and industry.
What's going on right now that's a little bit different
is NASA is turning to companies,
not to direct them what to do,
but it's turning to companies to build relationships
with them because those companies are attracting investment
from non-space sources and are bringing a different kind
of innovation to the table.
In the shadow of NASA's
sprawling Johnson Space Center,
the headquarters of startup Axiom Space
might seem a little modest, but their goal is big,
to build the first commercial space station.
Led by a former ISS program manager,
the team has been involved in every mission
to the station since its inception.
We know it has to be much lower cost to operate on orbit
than ISS is today so this is key
to continuing the heritage of ISS.
It's to start there so we can evolve everybody
to the next platform.
I liken this to the Internet.
So the Internet was created, and we got very excited,
and any kid with a good idea
and just the basic programming skills
could go build a program to do something.
We have huge companies that grew out of that
and still today there's new ideas, new things being built.
The thing about a microgravity environment
is it's limitless.
It's like the data we have access to
on the Internet is limitless.
And it is not immediately obvious to us all the benefits
that that's gonna entail
but over time it will become very, very obvious.
By 2024, Axiom plans to send a central node
to attach to the ISS that will make up the core
of their new station.
This will be followed by crew quarters for 16 people
and research and manufacturing modules.
When the ISS is retired,
this will break away and additional modules
with a life span of 30 years will be added
and swapped out as they age using a robotic arm.
And they're hoping to do all of this
for 1/50th the cost of the ISS.
I mean when you talk about our vision,
it sounds really simple.
It really is about
driving the thought process
and the cost down
so that anybody that wants to take advantage
of our place in orbit
and a microgravity environment can do so.
And that's really it.
Okay Ellen, I need to go towards my feet.
The International Space Station
is a fantastic vehicle but one of the big things
is they have quite a few major components outside.
Which means you have to do an EVA,
a spacewalk, to go fix it.
A spacewalk on a good day is a hundred hours of crew time
to get ready and actually go do the spacewalk,
so we're able to take advantage
of the reduced size of components.
And so our design is gonna have all of the components
are gonna be in a pressurized environment.
So we know what the basics are.
Water, food, clothing, life support.
And we know how to handle those
but now the next step is how do we make it more intuitive
and we want to now take advantage of the technologies
and the capabilities we have today
to build more luxury into the experience.
The objective is to make the environment the background
for all the users.
You're every day doing whatever you want to do on orbit.
Research, manufacturing, looking out the window.
Whatever you're there to do,
we want you to be able to do that
and not even think about the environment.
And it's because of our experience on ISS,
and what the team brings to Axiom Space,
we are able to build that environment.
You won't worry about that.
Three, two, one, release, release, release.
Fire, fire!
Like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin,
Axiom is hoping to attract space tourists
with tickets starting at $55 million for a 10-day mission.
But that's just one part
of the commercial space station market
that they think could be worth $37 billion
over the next decade.
Our first commercial customers
are countries who have astronauts in space
and want to expand their activity in space
and countries who do not yet
have a human space flight program
who want to send people up.
And we've now got both research and manufacturing companies
who want to do work with us
while we're at the International Space Station
and on our platform after it separates from ISS.
Human space flight is particularly exciting
because it's that slice of space that is really nascent.
It hasn't undergone the crowding that satellites have had.
It hasn't already had that explosive growth.
It's really ready for that now.
The first thing I'm really looking forward to seeing happen
is the face of our first astronauts on orbit
looking back down on us and knowing that we had a hand
in sending that person to space.
And ultimately the separation of ISS
when it's ready to be retired and de-orbited
and then we continue in space independently.
For me, that is a stepping off moment for humanity.
It's almost like when Neil Armstrong
put that first boot on the moon.
This will be the first time that we've gone
from a platform of learning how to live in space
to building our permanent home in space.
Other private companies
also want to use the ISS as a starting point
for their own ventures.
Bigelow Aerospace already has one
of its inflatable structures attached to the station.
And others including Sierra Nevada
and NanoRacks have put forward proposals.
Space habitats are expensive.
I think it's a false dichotomy to say,
"Okay, we're done with the International Space Station,
"let's move on to commercial platforms."
What I think is much more likely and realistic
and what NASA is certainly driving toward
is an incremental transition where commercial platforms
attach to the space station
or work collaboratively with the space station.
The next chapter cannot occur
without the active engagement of companies.
That said, that active engagement might not be as customers,
might not be as drivers,
it might be in service of government mission objectives.
We will return American astronauts to the moon.
Not only to leave behind footprints and flags
but to build the foundation we need
to send Americans to Mars and beyond.
This proposed mission,
along with SpaceX's own ambition to reach the Red Planet,
has opened up a longer term market.
And some companies are already thinking
beyond orbiting habitats like space stations
to actually building on the surface of other planets.
I was working in a firm designing skyscrapers
and I saw Elon and he landed his Falcon X rocket
in the middle of the ocean. And that, for me, was a trigger.
I thought, "Wow, this could actually happen."
And it's always been my dream
to put a building on the moon or Mars,
and if he's going at the pace he's going,
it could definitely happen within my lifetime
and I want to be the one to build it.
In this warehouse alongside startups
from across the U.S., architecture firm, AI SpaceFactory,
are refining the production of MARSHA,
a four-story structure they created for a NASA competition
to design the next generation of space habitats on Mars.
When we started designing our Mars habitat, MARSHA,
I think we looked at everything that had been done already
and kind of tossed that aside.
But what we were given was a set of guidelines from NASA.
They think the best way to build a habitat on Mars
or the moon is to use what they call
in situ resource utilization.
So use the materials that are there.
If you've seen Sci-Fi movies,
you might see glass and steel domes on distant planets,
but the reality is to ship that kind of material
to the moon or Mars would be so exorbitantly expensive
you would never be able to build in the first place.
So the idea is to send the 3D printing robot
which can then harvest the materials you find on a site
and build with that.
The reusable print material
is a mix of biopolymer made from recycled plastic
or plants like corn and sugarcane.
And basalt, the rock found on Mars and Earth.
It's the rock that gives us its incredible strength.
We've tested this material.
It's three times as strong as concrete in compression
and it actually has what we call it, a tensile compass.
It can prevent itself from being pulled apart
which is something concrete's not very good at.
You need to think at all times
how do you optimize the amount of material that you use.
And that's also why this thing is shaped like an egg.
And if you think of an egg,
it's a very structurally optimized form.
It's very, very thin but it provides the strength that
that egg needs and that's why
this is shaped the way that it is.
The egg shape
as well as the nested shell structure
also accommodates for extreme differences
in pressure and temperature on the surface of Mars.
But more research still needs to be done
to find out how print materials could be gathered
and how 3D printing would work
in the unique environment of space.
You're dealing with a completely different set of physics
and environments which is very harsh.
The cold, the low gravity, the vacuum of space.
And finding solutions for how to build there
or do anything in space
just requires a high degree of innovation.
There's no such thing as brute force when it comes to space.
Like you need to think about the problem,
find a very elegant, lightweight, cost-effective solution.
The next challenge is really going to places on Earth,
literally taking the dirt that we're finding on a site,
and beginning to print with the dirt.
We have to perfect this technology on Earth,
and then we go prove it out on the moon,
and then finally on to Mars.
The first customers
could include NASA and companies like SpaceX
who would lease out these structures
for individual missions.
But before that AI SpaceFactory
hope their technology could be monetized
as well as transformational here on Earth.
The challenges of building on Mars forced us
to make this jump in construction technology
which we can now apply on Earth to build more sustainably.
So rather than building with steel and concrete,
which are these manufactured,
very energy-intensive materials, to go to a site,
have a solar powered array
that would then allow our 3D printer
to print in the most sustainable way possible.
And we never would have found these ways
if it wasn't for the challenge of building in space.
Three, two, one.
Ignition and liftoff of the Falcon 9 to the space station
on the first commercial launch
from Kennedy Space Center's historic Pad 39A.
Humans have now been consistently living
and working in space for more than 15 years.
And if we want to keep that up,
what do habitats need to look like?
And frankly, they can be large or they can be small,
but the future of space habitats really, to me,
comes down to the ability
to persistently maintain human presence.
Whether that's a few people or many people,
that seems to be the dividing line
between where we were before
and where we want to be in the future.
We have to learn how to benefit from what we do on orbit
and bring those natural benefits back home
so we help ourselves out on the ground
while we also learn to live somewhere else.
And it really, at the very deepest level,
is about survival of our species,
so I get pretty excited when I spend a few moments
thinking about what we're off to go do
'cause this really is the first step
to learning to live off the planet.
That first step is just the start
of our journey to create a lasting legacy in space.
While commercial companies may be stepping in
to imagine what these new space habitats look like,
it's what's happening inside of them
that may unlock the future of space industrialization.
On the next episode of Giant Leap,
we'll visit the private companies
who are looking to build their business
around manufacturing in space.
Using the unique properties of microgravity,
they plan to create new materials
with extraordinary qualities
that can't be replicated on Earth.
Including new manufacturing techniques
that could change how we build large structures in space
and even unlock the ability to 3D print full human organs.
But before low earth orbit
can become a new industrial center,
we're going to need to take another giant leap.