[00:00:00] Host: Welcome to Lockheed Martin Space Makers, the podcast that takes you out of this world for an inside look at some of our most challenging and innovative missions. My name is Ben, and I'll be your host.

[00:00:14] In season two, we explore Lockheed Martin's bold new vision of a future we call "Space 2050." We partnered with our Advanced Technology Center to bring you an inside look at the innovations and technologies we are developing to make that future a reality. Because getting there is just the beginning.

[00:00:35] The future of space is big business, spawning technologies that will take humankind to deep space. Creating new Moon and Mars-based economies that will include everything from trade routes to human habitats – to new lunar rovers and, yes, eventually poets, artists, and even pets. But what does that really look like? How will we build homes, factories, and even medical facilities? In this episode of Space Makers, My colleague Natalya Oleksik takes a closer look at how humans will live and work on the Moon and beyond.

[00:01:10] Natalya: All right. I'm Natalya Oleksik, and I'm sitting here with Rob Chambers from Lockheed Martin. Rob, tell us your title and a little bit about what you do.

[00:01:17] Rob Chambers: Well, my name is Rob Chambers. I'm the director of strategy and business development for all of commercial civil space, which within the Lockheed Martin Space family is responsible for weather satellites and climate, robotic and human space flight missions, and all of our commercial spacecraft for communications.

[00:01:36] Natalya: We wanna hear a lot about what your day looks like and some of the things that you're passionate about that you work on here at Lockheed Martin Space. But what I'd like to first talk about is, we're in our second episode of Lockheed Martin Space Makers. Episode one, we talked about untethering from earth, how doe we break the bonds of gravity? How do we get people up into space more often to do more things? This episode is about, what do we do when we get there?

[00:01:59] Rob Chambers: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:01:59] Natalya: What do we do in terms of everything from colonizing space to establishing a space economy?

[00:02:06] Rob Chambers: It's what makes me tick. We talk a lot about the rockets and the flames and the smoke, which is the first minutes of the mission and the missions go on for ultimately decades. The things that we do in space as humanity isn't measured in a single mission or isn't measured in a single flight. It's measured in how we build upon infrastructure and our knowledge of the solar system. So we at Lockheed Martin have been on Mars since 1976, working with Viking. We've had the honor, the privilege to work with NASA on every mission to Mars. We've built more deep space spacecraft than all other US companies combined, and more than any other company in the world. So we live happily well beyond the bound of gravity.

[00:02:53] For me, when we think about where we're headed as the human race and Lockheed Martin's part of it, it's to create a sustainable and sustained set of activities out in space that can ultimately allow us to become independent of earth. As long as we're tied to our earth in terms of goods and services or products, water, fuel, propellant, we're not truly independent and we're not taking advantage of what the solar system has to offer. So all of our forward leaning, all of our thinking is, how do we do this in a way that ultimately is self-sustaining?

[00:03:31] Natalya: So you're touching on a huge theme here at Lockheed Martin Space, which is getting there is just the beginning. We're sitting there, we're thinking about what we do when we get there. And you're talking about also a profound change for humanity itself. We will have at some point in the near future, a whole nother level of existence. It will be in space, but what kinda challenges do you see that posing for earth?

[00:03:54] Rob Chambers: You know, space, everything in space tries to kill you. [laughing] It is not a, it is not a normal environment for humans, right? We don't have gravity. We don't have air. Of course, temperatures are very severe being able to reclaim water and so forth. But all of those things we have to solve to live in space are things that can help us right here on earth. We often talk about, when you go to the moon or you go to Mars, you need the same things you need when you move into a new house. Electricity, water, cable, and a family car. And those are the four areas we can chat a little bit about here that are the focus areas for enabling what that future is gonna look like. And every one of those activities will help us with those similar activities back here on earth.

[00:04:41] Natalya: Okay, well, I'm gonna jump into something that has caught my eye, which is the car.

[00:04:45] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:04:45] Natalya: I know that we have a program right now. We're partnering you with GM to build a lunar rover that will take humans around Mars in ... excuse me, humans around the moon in a way that enables us to be mobile and to do work there. So tell us a little bit about that.

[00:05:01] Rob Chambers: Yeah. In both moon and Mars, so you weren't wrong.

[00:05:03] Natalya: [laughs].

[00:05:04] Rob Chambers: You know what's great is that building a system that can work at the moon also work at Mars, and that's one of the overarching things we're always keeping in mind is, what's over that next horizon or the horizon after next? So our partnership with general motors on this lunar mobility vehicle, LMV, we need a better, more clever name, but that's our working title, is it's been very, very fascinating. Of course, general motor built the first lunar rover vehicle, LRV if I recall correctly back in the day. And so it's really exciting to have Lockheed Martin, one of the top or the top aerospace company today with General Motors, who is the top company doing electric vehicles, and of course built that first lunar rover so long ago.

[00:05:49] The concept behind the rover is first and foremost, it's industry funded. We're looking to provide service to NASA, to commercial partners, to international partners. And so we're investing significantly in the technologies and the non-recurring expenses to build that system up. The rover itself, we've shown pictures at a variety of trade shows. You can go out and Google it. Very futuristic looking of course, but also very practical. Four wheels, seats fold up when the crew is there, they fold down and get out of the way when the crew is not there. And the objective is that everything that happens on the moon, you're gonna require mobility. If you think about what you do here on earth, we don't do that much by walking around anymore. So whether you're building skyscrapers or you are creating roads, or you are laying power lines, all of those require mobility. And that's the fundamental, the foundation for anything that occurs on the moon will be mobility. And that's what we're targeting with a, this multi-use mobile vehicle.

[00:06:53] Natalya: It requires mobility, but it also requires propulsion fuel.

[00:06:56] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:06:57] Natalya: What does that mean?

[00:06:58] Rob Chambers: This is a purely electric car. Without air, you can't really have a combustion engine on the moon. And plus, we want to make use of technologies that are right for the problem, right? The right tool for the problem, right tool for the job. And so from a lunar perspective having completely solar powered systems that are very high efficiency batteries that are fed by the energy of the sun are the same technologies that both General Motors and Lockheed Martin have been working back here on earth, and of course in our spacecraft for the last, you know, many decades.

[00:07:33] Natalya: So what does that look like? Solar panels on the moon?

[00:07:35] Rob Chambers: Looks like big solar panels that'll charge up the world's greatest batteries that general motors has been developing for electric vehicles. This will allow us to do something that is harder than most folks realize, which is what we call surviving the night. So the night on the moon is actually two weeks long, measured by earth. And that's just because the moon always faces the earth and it takes a month to go around the earth. And so if you think about it, the sun comes and goes on the surface of the moon over the course of a month. Well, that two weeks in the darkness is some of the coldest ... it's colder than anything on earth and it's some of the coldest stuff in the solar system. We're down at, in the, measured in the 50 or 70 Kelvin, which is just 50 or 70, you know, degrees above absolute zero.

[00:08:19] So those are phenomenally cold temperature that require small amounts of power to stay warm and survive that night, keep the avionics warm and a lot of very, very clever design for how even the mechanics, the actuators, the wheels, the tires, all of that surviving, you know, measured in the hundreds of degrees below zero that were familiar with here on earth.

[00:08:42] Natalya: Can you name some of the toughest problems that poses when it comes to developing this rover?

[00:08:46] Rob Chambers: I would say first and foremost, that temperature swing.

[00:08:49] Natalya: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:08:49] Rob Chambers: So it's very, very hot during the day, very, very cold at night. And so that temperature swing, although it occurs over a month or over two week cycles is still very, very taxing on the system. The second one I would say would be autonomy. We want this system to be able to go pull the pole on the moon, be able to explore craters, steep craters at the equator and get down into interesting areas on both the north and south pole and be able to operate on that lunar far side, the side that never faces the earth, which means the system has to be what we call a autonomous, which just means it can drive itself. We're not steering it from the ground, from earth. We aren't programming way points. We're giving it a destination and telling it to go.

[00:09:33] And that's fundamentally different from how we, the human race have explored Mars for example. With Mars, we spend about 90% of our I'm traveling and getting ready to do science and about 10% doing science and that's because of how we interact with the rover. We tell it to go a little ways, we see where we want to go next or an interesting rock, and then we tell it to go a little bit further, but we can never drive further overnight with an automated sequence than we can see, because there aren't a lot of smarts on the rover. This is a, hey, go meet us at the north pole. Tell us when you get there. If you see something interesting along the way, stop. That's the level of autonomy that we're working with here, which will transform science and it will also advance some technologies that will benefit us back here on earth, because that kind of off-road autonomy is very nascent here on earth and would transform how we live in some of the services we get here right on this planet.

[00:10:31] Natalya: Can you clarify? So the passengers on the rover are not driving the rover. They're not directing the rover. They're passengers and the rover is being directed by earth.

[00:10:40] Rob Chambers: So for the concept behind the rover, it's going to be their year in, year out operating 24/7 hibernating in the darkness let's say. The crew is gonna be there, you know, a couple of weeks out of the year based on NASA's current plans.

[00:10:54] Natalya: Okay.

[00:10:54] Rob Chambers: The autonomy of the vehicle, it's ability to maneuver around and take science is it's its job number one, which is probably 50 weeks out of the year. Now, when the crew is there that's a whole different ballgame. We'll put the seats up, the crew will climb in and based on all the astronauts that I know, they will most definitely want to drive the rover. I can't think of anything more fun than that. We're we've got a lot of simulators, one six gravity is what the lunar gravity is. And if you think about being able to pull some air with the lunar rover... boy, I just can't think of anything more fun than taking that out for a spin.

[00:11:26] So they'll definitely be in control, but think of it as what we call supervised autonomy. So the crew is ... it's almost like a fly by wire system. The crew will be driving, but there'll be plenty of smarts going on in the background from attraction control and hazard avoidance and guidance perspective and giving them those way points. We had to move very slowly with the original Apollo rover. There weren't a lot of computing power back then and no one had really driven around in one six gravity very much. So we had to take it slow and easy. Our active with the lunar mobility vehicle is to have that fly by wire system that allows the crew to move quickly and get from point to point and then perform their science. And it'll be a blending of human and robot, we hope.

[00:12:11] Natalya: All right, I'm gonna go back to pull some air. Is that the same as pulling a wheely? What does that mean? [laughs].

[00:12:15] Rob Chambers: [laughs] Yes, that's true. In pulling air, of course there is no air, but just getting up off the surface, coming over a dune...

[00:12:22] Natalya: [laughs].

[00:12:23] Rob Chambers: ... for the older listeners of the podcast, you know, think kit car, it's gonna be amazing. You know, we'd love to, if we get enough of these built, maybe do some racing on the moon as a source of revenue as well. If anybody's interested, give me a call.

[00:12:35] Natalya: That's great to hear. And soone other thing you mentioned that what we're developing up on the lunar surface for navigation for ... I'm gonna use the term propulsion, but-

[00:12:46] Rob Chambers: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:12:46] Natalya: ... to move the lunar rover around the moon you say, could have a profound impact on how we move humans around earth.

[00:12:53] Rob Chambers: That's right. Everything we do on earth is ... first of all, the money is spent on earth. It's not spent in space, and all the technologies we develop at least here at Lockheed Martin are focused on things that haven't been done yet, things that haven't been done and are commoditized. There's a lot of folks that know how to help us with those. What we have to do is the problems that no one else has figured out using the technologies that maybe aren't quite ready for it. So when we think about building a rover that can operate in these huge temperature swings that can drive from the lunar pole to lunar pole over the course of a few earth months and can perform this autonomous science, those capabilities are directly relevant to life here on earth. So for example, cutting edge batteries.

[00:13:40] So right now battery technology is advancing significantly, but I, for one find that in my electric car, battery mileage goes down quite a bit in the cold weather. So are we able to, as part of these studies adjust our understanding of the chemistry and the mechanical nature and materials natures such that we can improve that back here on earth from just a performance perspective? Another one is on autonomy. There's a lot of talk of self-driving cars and so forth. And a lot of those are just driver-assist, you know, looking for a lane and getting confused about things in the environment and that can lead to injury and death if you're putting too much stock in some of those capabilities. There are no lanes on the moon. There are no paved roads. Everything looks similar and has harsh shadows. And so some of the technologies, the sensors we have to develop will very much be applicable back here on earth for self-driving mobility in just providing a safer environment for those of us on the road.

[00:14:42] Natalya: I don't know. I'm gonna take it a little step further here. I'm just so curious. What about moon crashes? So we have a lunar rover up there and it pull some air. Is that correct term? Pull some air?

[00:14:51] Rob Chambers: Yeah, yeah.

[00:14:51] Natalya: And it flips over upside down and there's no one on it. And do we lose it forever? Is it dead to us or are there contingency plans to save the rover?

[00:14:59] Rob Chambers: Yeah, there, there definitely are. The first thing we talked about was rolls bars.

[00:15:02] You know, when we think about the curiosity rover and some of the rovers that we've helped JPL build over the years and help them land, very methodical, very, very high value assets, of course. And so we think, we the human race think very carefully before we do anything with those rovers. And that limits how much science we can do because we have to drive slowly. It also means we're very hesitant about driving into steep hill, for example, and that can limit sometimes the ability to get to interesting places. And so what we said for the LMV right off the bat, when we sat down with our general motors partners, we said, we need to have a system that we're not afraid to ding up a little bit ... whoever rolls this thing from mission control is, will never hear the end of it, but-

[00:15:50] Natalya: They'll be famous forever, right?

[00:15:51] Rob Chambers: They'll be famous forever, but it needs to not be the end of that person or the rover because that's gonna happen potentially right? We want to get into steep slopes and we want to be able to recover the system. We're gonna be able to replace tires autonomously. So we'll have a spare. Any rover that doesn't have an arm isn't a real rover by our perspective, so we'll have a robotic arm working with some partners to get that. So be able to change our own flat tires all without the humans there, and that's because this asset, once we land it this is the size of a Hummer. And we talk about the beefiness of these types of systems. And it's really fun.

[00:16:27] You know, we hear at Lockheed Martin talk about grams of mass and how to optimize spacecraft design, 'cause we're going to Mars or we're going out to Jupiter with the Juno mission or we're gonna go, you know, tap on, on Bennu with those high-res recs. And so we measure things in grams at that point. When we sit down with general motors, we're talking about beefing these things up, you know, a 750 kilogram, 1500 pound rover, the size of a Hummer, that is transformational in terms of what you could do with it.

[00:16:57] Natalya: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:16:57] Rob Chambers: And so we haven't lost that this needs to be beefy. This, we can't be afraid of this. This has gotta be a beefy rover that's ready to do 10 years of hard labor on the moon.

[00:17:07] Natalya: And it sounds like that's step one, right? We have a rover, we're up on the moon.

[00:17:12] Rob Chambers: Yeah.

[00:17:12] Natalya: Do you consider this one of the first major steps in a new space economy?

[00:17:15] Rob Chambers: Absolutely. I've always talked about this concept of electricity, water cable and the family car, and it's almost in reverse order. One of the first things you're gonna need is communications, and the next thing you're gonna need arguably right after that is this mobility.

[00:17:31] Natalya: Yeah.

[00:17:31] Rob Chambers: But those are just basic enablers, just to allow you to exist on the moon. And what's really interesting then is talking about the electricity, which is the generation and distribution of power beyond just solar arrays for the mobile system to drive around. And then ultimately what I get jazzed about is the water, right? There is no water company. We can't just turn on the service and open the spigot. We can talk a little bit about some of how you harness the resources that are on the moon itself, but first step, communications and mobility. And so we at Lockheed Martin are working on LMV the Luna mobility vehicle and Parsec, which is our communications systems. And then those become the foundations for everything that we're gonna do right afterwards.

[00:18:16] Natalya: Yes. And for listeners, Parsec is an autonomous satellite that will launch that circles the moon and speaks to other swarms of satellites, correct?

[00:18:27] Rob Chambers: That's right. There are some companies out there who think they want to do it all and are what we call vertically integrated. So they don't partner with other smaller companies. They don't have technology partners, don't have international partners. From a Lockheed Martin standpoint, exploration and collaboration is in our DNA. Like I just dunno how any other way to approach this. Exploring, once you get off the earth, it is by definition a global [laughs] activity. So for us, everything has to be in a way that helps other people out and reduces the barrier of entry. And so our partial communication satellite is the first node will immediately begin communicating with other communication satellites that are out there and, or back here on earth so that we can start a network. If you think about the robustness of our life here on earth, it's because there's a network, it's not just one company or one tech or one solution. Everything can interconnect get kind of the internet of things if you really wanna get philosophical.

[00:19:26] So that's our same approach for how we see the moon being developed and then ultimately Mars. And so that first communication satellite will talk to other satellites provided by other folks, will provide connectivity, very high bandwidth from the moon back here to earth, and will stimulate a more local communications network at the moon because we need to move processing to be at the moon. We're gonna need to end this complete dependence on everyone and zero coming back to earth. We're gonna have to be able to make decisions, what we call converting data into information. So we get lots of data from our sensors, but we need to turn that into usable information and we have to do that locally. We can't just send all that data back and forth to the earth.

[00:20:09] Natalya: Lemme ask you a couple questions about that. Parsec is potentially launching 2024. You mentioned global cooperation, you mentioned the importance of communications, of course underpinning even before mobility, we must have communications. What's the first thing you said Parsec's gonna talk to these satellites? What's the first thing they're gonna talk about?

[00:20:27] Rob Chambers: The first thing we're gonna talk to is probably that mobility system when it comes in on the far side. The interesting thing about exploring the surface of the moon is the fact that the far side is the far side and it's always the far side. It's not always dark, despite what Pink Floyd said. And so when you're on the far side, you literally cannot see the earth. And so the only way you communicate to the earth is via these interfaces. I think the first communication through Parsec is going to be from ... and it'll be sort of a Watson come here-

[00:20:58] Natalya: I was just gonna ask that.

[00:20:59] Rob Chambers: Absolutely. It's gonna ... and we'll have to use that as the lexicon, but it'll be from earth through Parsec to one of the assets at the moon, probably LRO, 'cause it's still out there, and back to Parsec and back to us. And be the first time we've done an intercommunication to another, a spacecraft from deep space at the moon in a pure commercial service. So all those little things that I described have been done in some fashion or other, but not as a commercial service, not as a industry owned asset where we sell the data to the customer, to NASA, as opposed to the system.

[00:21:37] Natalya: Data as a service.

[00:21:38] Rob Chambers: Data as a service.

[00:21:40] Natalya: So I'm gonna explore this a little bit further with you too. So when you say what Watson come here, you're referring to Thomas Edison-

[00:21:46] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:21:46] Natalya: ... in the telephone, and he was in one room and his assistant Watson was in the other and he said something to the effect of Watson, can you hear me?

[00:21:53] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:21:53] Natalya: I believe. And that was the first telephone transmission in the history of humankind.

[00:21:57] Rob Chambers: Right.

[00:21:57] Natalya: So now we're talking about Parsec, there will be that first message. Can you give us a little peak inside the mind of engineers that have worked so hard to make this happen? Do you think this will be a moment in space history?

[00:22:09] Rob Chambers: It'll be a moment. It'll also be terrifying. We all try to play off that we have all the answers as engineers, and you work for years on the spacecraft. And then when it does come time to launch, all you can think about is all the tests you didn't run-

[00:22:22] Natalya: [laughs].

[00:22:22] Rob Chambers: ... or all of the things you might have forgotten. And it's really surreal and I've seen it happen to everyone. So at the moment where your tech is about to be used, you're just gonna be worried that you screwed something up. When it works, it is this sense of course pride, right? But it's almost a sense of humility if you're working on something that fundamentally changes the course of human events, and this is gonna be one of those. The engineers will be in scientists, technologists, the technicians that put the hardware together, without whom we wouldn't have systems that work. All of those folks will feel this incredible sense of having made history. And sometimes you don't realize that you made history until after the fact. In this instance, people will understand the implications when it happens.

[00:23:06] Natalya: Well, I'm gonna bring up a word that you invoked a little bit earlier in our discussion. You mentioned the word terror.

[00:23:12] Rob Chambers: Ah, [laughs].

[00:23:12] Natalya: And I worked, I worked with you and the communications team to cover insight in 2018-

[00:23:17] Rob Chambers: Yes, yes.

[00:23:17] Natalya: ... learned about the seven minutes of terror.

[00:23:19] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:23:19] Natalya: Yes.

[00:23:20] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:23:20] Natalya: And you have lived that seven minutes of terror as a scientist working that program.

[00:23:24] Rob Chambers: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:23:25] Natalya: You have also, I understand, correct me if I'm wrong. In your earlier career, you actually did work on some programs that had some pretty significant mistakes.

[00:23:34] Rob Chambers: We all have. So you would never get that wrong. If you asked any engineer, have you been on a program where you had some significant failures? You know, we had one coming off a vehicle. It was, I was the guidance and navigation deputy and the head for the flight software at the time. And we came off the launch vehicle and immediately went into safe mode, started spinning up and went into safe mode. And later we figured out what the problem was, and it was something that we just hadn't thought of. And I learned two things first. How quickly ... Well, three things. First, thank goodness for safe mode.

[00:24:03] All of our spacecraft have redundant systems and fallbacks. On the Orion program, for example, we have four flight computers each with two processors. We have a safe mode that can boot back into, we've got a backup computer that's completely dissimilar and then we have an emergency mode for the crew. And it's because what gets you in space isn't what you didn't think of, it's what you didn't know to think of. A- and that is playing with words a little bit, but it's the unknown unknowns. It's the failure of imagination that gets you.

[00:24:35] And so you design things to be what I call bulletproof, which means, yeah. You think through all of the failure modes and you think through why the spacecraft could spin up and you plan for those, and you have your engineering review boards and you put in the flight software and so forth, but then you stop and say, "Okay, let's say something else just happened. Don't know why, what would the spacecraft do?" And whether you call that survivability or reliability or just resilience, those are the conversations that we have for these high asset, high value systems, crude or uncrude that we send out far beyond Leo where the system has to take care of itself. And that's where the expense comes from, and that's why it's so complex.

[00:25:18] If you look at the Orion spacecraft and you take the skin off, you would be astounded, and there are pictures out there on the web, you can go look. Every square inch of that spacecraft is covered by wires or sensors or actuators harnesses. And that's because we've put such a densified, that's the word tend to use, densified set of capabilities into the smallest package and lightest package we can to give the crew and the science a fighting chance when things happen. So when I said it was terrifying, it's because by definition, you can't predict the unpredictable. So you're wondering what gremlins are gonna come out, and is the system that I designed and built enslaved over resilient to those unknown unknowns? And that's what differentiates an exploration class spacecraft like Orion, from what we say, a taxi class spacecraft that's going up and down to ISS where you could get home in a couple of hours.

[00:26:10] Natalya: Yeah. And you mentioned exploration and taxi class.

[00:26:14] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:26:14] Natalya: So I know that here at Lockheed Martin, exploration class is ours.

[00:26:18] Rob Chambers: Yes.

[00:26:18] Natalya: Right? That's Orion.

[00:26:20] Rob Chambers: That's right.

[00:26:20] Natalya: There is only one Orion. So when we talk about that, we are talking about taking those moments of terror-

[00:26:26] Rob Chambers: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:26:26] Natalya: ... and the potential pitfalls of failure of imagination to new levels never seen before in space exploration. Is that unique to lockheed Martin?

[00:26:36] Rob Chambers: You can only earn those lessons by earning those lessons, to be honest learning those lessons. We've had many failures on our various spacecraft and most people don't hear about 'em because the systems are designed to accommodate those. Some of 'em we expect, and some of them we don't expect. Every one of those is a lesson that you go back and really agonize about, failure review boards and conversations about why didn't this go just the way we expected? The mission would still be 100% successful, right? We get all the science, everyone comes home safe, but everything that doesn't look quite right, we stop and think. And it's not because we're obsessive about that one thing, it's because it reveals a vulnerability in the overall system. I don't know of any other company on earth that spends that level of energy and attention to ensure not just that you get the mission success, but that you have the underpinnings for it.

[00:27:30] You know, anybody can hit 85% probability of success. That's from a statistical, you know, Poisson distribution. That's not that hard. If you wanna be at 99.9, that's a completely different ballgame. And when it comes to deep space, truly autonomous systems that you can't just repair that have to return from the moon like Orion does with no communications from earth, no upload of burn trajectories, no navigation and no air, we have to do all that with a punctured haul. That's a seven day journey coming back, and the spacecraft and the crew in it are enabled to do that. And there is no other spacecraft on earth and has never been a spacecraft built that could do those types of things. And it only exists because of countless hours with astronauts, with operations folks, and with the history that NASA brings to the table alongside Lockheed Martin who's got more experience working in deep space than every other American company put together. That's unique, and that's, that's Orion.

[00:28:30] Natalya: You've been listening to part one of our two-part interview with Rob Chambers. We learned how self-repairing rovers will increase our mobility on the Moon and Mars. How a communication satellite on the dark side of the Moon called Parsec™ will connect humans like never before and how learning from failure helps us solve the toughest challenges that come with bringing big business to space.

[00:28:56] In part two of our interview with Rob, we take an "inside" look at what happens when you add humans to the mix and how will they live and work in deep space.

[00:29:09] Host: You've been listening to Rob Chambers who is a space maker. Whether you're a software engineer, systems, engineer, finance, or HR professional, we need space makers like you to make the seemingly impossible missions a reality. Please visit this episode’s show notes to learn more about what you just heard in this episode or the careers available at Lockheed Martin. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe so others can find us and follow along for more out of this world stories. To learn more about our missions, products and people, follow our new Twitter handle @LMSpace and visit lockheedmartin.com/space. Join us on the next episode as we introduce you to more space makers.

[00:29:55] Space Makers is a production of Lockheed Martin Space.

[00:29:59] It's executive produced by Pavan Desai.

[00:30:01] Senior producer is Natalya Oleksik.

[00:30:03] Senior producer, writer, and host is Ben Dinsmore.

[00:30:06] Sound design and audio mastered by Julian Giraldo.

[00:30:10] Graphic design by Tim Roesch.

[00:30:12] Marketing and recruiting by Joe Portnoy, Shannon Myers, Mallory Richardson, and Stephanie Dixon.

[00:30:17] A huge thanks to all the communication professionals at Lockheed Martin who helped make these stories possible.

[00:30:24] Thanks for joining us and see you next time.