“I didn’t know what was going to happen in the industry when I got into it. I thought I would end up working at NASA and I would help make the space shuttle engines a little bit better over my career, having no idea that the industry was changing so much.”
Jason Dunn
Key takeaways
- Think big but start small. Companies getting started in the space industry need to identify a first step they can take that can be monetized and commercialized.
- Space is more than a place for searching for scientific truth; it’s a place for real business and industry to exist.
- The way to get humans living in space is to create jobs in space.
Interview
Robert Jacobson: So the first question I have is what inspired you to get involved with space? You have two degrees in aerospace and what was the inspiration, either fictional or non-fictional, for you to get involved in this area?
Jason Dunn: I see myself more like an explorer at heart, and it’s always been a sense of exploration that drove me to my interest in space. Growing up on the Gulf of Mexico, we have these islands that run offshore; some are connected by a causeway. But up north in the Tarpon Springs area, the islands are a little more remote. There’s no bridges, no cars, but I grew up on the water, and I had my own boat, and I would take it out. My parents got my brother our first little boat and me when we were only about eight or 10 years old, and just having the freedom to explore, it was very much a part of me at a young age. Having this island that I could go to, offshore, I had the sense of looking back and seeing the land and where the lights are, where the buildings and people are.
Directly across the state of Florida is Kennedy Space Center, so when a shuttle would be launching at night, we would go out front and watch that, and we could see the little star moving up in the sky. So I think that probably fostered my love of space, just knowing that people were on that little star shooting up into space, kind of making the connection that they were on a journey very similar to what I would do on my boat- leaving the shore, moving beyond and being able to look back at their home planet. So that was the majority of my childhood, exploration and just thinking space is cool.
I ended up going to school at UCF in Orlando [the University of Central Florida in Orlando] because I knew engineering sounded like the thing I wanted to do and I chose UCF because I thought it would be really cool to go work it at NASA, so I just want to be really close to NASA. That’s where I started to really find my own passion, and figure out what space meant to me and why it was important to me,
I met people through that process, like Peter Diamondis [the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation]. Starting around 2005, when I was in my undergrad, meeting Elon [Musk] at a student conference in 2007. So meeting these people and realizing what was happening in the industry got me very excited. I didn’t know what was going to happen in the industry when I got into it. I thought I would end up working at NASA and I would help make the space shuttle engines a little bit better over my career, having no idea that the industry was changing so much.
Robert: I know at one point you went to the Singularity University [a think tank in Silicon Valley]. What was that experience like? My understanding is that it was a bit of a catalyst for your current effort, Made in Space.
Jason: I met my co-founders at Singularity University in 2010, and we started Made in Space that summer while we were also attending SU. I found myself at Singularity in an interesting way. Shortly before the fall of 2009, I had graduated with a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, and I had also, during my master’s program, started a company called Earthrise Space Foundation, a student-run nonprofit, which at the time was the only student organization to enter the Google Lunar XPRIZE.
I did that on a whim, really, like why not, let’s go do that. And in the process of my fellow students and me building out plans for a moon mission, I realized that’s what I wanted to do like I wanted to work with a small team and build real space missions. I liked this idea of entrepreneurship and building companies, but I had no idea what I was doing. So I decided to go out to Singularity University because I had been following it since it got started and I knew that there was a really good chance for me to learn a little bit more about building a company but more importantly meet more people who wanted to do that and surround myself with more people who wanted to think the way I was thinking. So I went out in 2010 to really just surround myself with people who also were trying to create companies and learn from them, hoping that I might find other people who wanted to start a space company. And it turned out that the day I got there, I met Aaron Kemmler, my co-founder at Made in Space, who has a business background, a love of space and had shown up at Singularity University with the exact same type of goal in mind. He was hoping to meet the aerospace engineer who wanted to start a space company with him, and I was hoping to find someone who wanted to start a space company with me.
So we spent that summer doing business planning, doing white papers, doing studies to understand different market needs, which was awesome. Where else do you get this opportunity, you have ten weeks, you’re in this program that’s feeding you, housing you, taking care of every single need you have. So it was just 24 hours a day of uninhibited, let’s just study all the problems space has from a business perspective. And we truly did look at all these problems. A lot of the new space companies that were coming out over the past few years were ideas that we had also considered. We settled on the idea of Made in Space and what it’s been doing because we recognized that it actually is one of the most important enablers for every single other idea that is being talked about.
Robert: Without the fundamentals, you can’t do all the cool applications, if you think of manufacturing as a fundamental.
Jason: The universe is made of things and things are created, and things are transported, and that’s pretty how everything works. So transportation and manufacturing turn out to be two really core tenets to any type of business or economy.
Robert: So it sounds like you took this leap, in terms of going to a new educational program at Singularity. What was the most challenging part for you with that? Or were you just trusting that this was going to be right?
Jason: I’m a big believer that what you focus on is what you achieve or what you get. And you know, where you put your energy is the outcome that will happen. I was really focused on finding these people and building this company and doing those things, and that’s how it turned out. I think it equally could have been a lot harder had I been pessimistic or negative about how hard it would be, but I choose not to think of it that way. So I can look back on it and say that I think there’s a huge amount of luck involved, but I also think there’s a huge amount of hard work involved.
It was by no means a cakewalk; every day still is a challenge of building a company, finding product-market fit, understanding the customer needs, finding ways to capitalize on them and so on. Sometimes I think from the outside, things can look easy, like it obviously was a good idea, so that’s why it worked. But the idea of space manufacturing has been talked about for the entire history of the space industry over half a century and before that, in science fiction, so it wasn’t an idea that we invented and it just happened to be a wonderful idea. It’s an idea that existed forever; it just took a bit of a new way of thinking to go after it. And that was actually one of the benefits of us coming up with this idea for this company while at the Singularity University program because the focus of that program is how do you solve the world’s biggest problems or maybe some of the challenges that the world has known about for a long time using new sets of technologies and new ways of thinking. So we built the entire company on exponential thinking, on forecasting technologies using some very accurate models to predict where the technologies would be headed, so we completely understood where 3D printing and robotics was headed in 2010 and were able to build a company based on that and that I think was the real specialty in how we approached it compared to what others have been looking at.
Robert: What could you say if you were talking to somebody who’s just coming out of school and looking to be part of this sector?
Robert: I think probably my biggest piece of advice that I’m always trying to give is to think big but start small. There’s a lot of companies that get started in this industry, and they’re thinking big, they’re doing a really good job at thinking big, but they’re doing a really bad job at understanding the very first step that they can take that is monetize-able, commercialize-able.
“Does the world need right now platinum from an asteroid? I don't think so; I don't think that's a current economic need right now. But it will become one. Absolutely we will get to the point in time where we've exhausted our resource demands on the planet, and we will have to go off-world to get those resources.”
Does the world need right now platinum from an asteroid? I don’t think so; I don’t think that’s a current economic need right now. But it will become one. Absolutely we will get to the point in time where we’ve exhausted our resource demands on the planet, and we will have to go off-world to get those resources. But you have to create companies that can get us from A to B. That’s my biggest piece of advice. Start small. For us, our small step was a 3D printer on the International Space Station that is useful today even with current 3D printing technology. That is a huge benefit over the current method of duct tape on the space station. So there’s a real customer that’s there, and if we could just convince NASA, the customer, that they should have it, then we should be on our way towards manufacturing in space. A 3D printer on the space station was not the purpose of our company. The purpose of our company is that one day, nothing is ever is launched from planet earth, everything is manufactured in space, so it’s a very small step compared to the big vision, but it’s one that we could build a business around.
Robert: Assuming NASA is your first customer, can you share how you got that first customer, the steps that it took to get that first customer?
Jason: So it’s a lot about building relationships. I don’t think we ever looked at NASA and said that’s the customer, let’s go get the customer. We looked at it as that is the best partnership we could possibly have right now, let’s go partner with NASA and do this together,
We found that through doing our business planning and thinking of the idea of the 3D printer on the space station and saying, of course, NASA must be working on this. And then we started looking around to figure out what programs does NASA have to put a 3D printer on the space station and what we found to our surprise, two things. One, NASA did not have a program to put a 3D printer on the space station. More surprising, we found that in the 1990s, there were NASA researchers that were trying to put a 3D printer on the space station. There were these researchers in Huntsville who had tested very early-stage 3D printers in microgravity, and they assessed what would have to change to make them work and they started writing papers saying, hey, this technology really could be useful on the space station. So for us, that was like the jackpot. We went out, and we met with these researchers, these scientists in Huntsville and we said, look, we’re going to start a company now. We think the technology has finally gotten to the point where what you were thinking about in the 1990s is doable. Certain patents have expired, certain technologies have progressed, microcontrollers are better, sensors are better, and we think now’s the time. We built a working relationship with that group, and that’s how it all happened. Together as a group, we flew the printer to the space station. The researcher, Ken Cooper, who had written those papers in the 1990s, he became the principal investigator on the NASA side of that mission, so we helped, working together to bring that vision to reality from the 1990s. At the end of the day, it’s always about building relationships. We never took investment. To date, we’ve never taken dilutive equity capital into the company because we were really certain that there were customers out there who would want this and then we found the partners within NASA who were able to vocalize that same exact idea within their agency and that built up the momentum and the need for the technology to happen. To build the right relationships and other things should just fall into place.
Robert: Is it true that you also have a second machine that on ISS, the additive manufacturing facility? Can you maybe share a bit about that and the differences between the two?
Jason: So the first machine that we sent to the ISS, that was called the 3D Printing in Zero-Gravity Experiment or 3D Print for short, that was a total technology demonstration. We were just learning with NASA, does a 3D printer work in space the way we think it will. That mission was a success. Everything worked, and then we went off and, from all the lessons that we learned, we built a new printer. It’s called the additive manufacturing facility. We call it AMF and what’s unique about it, aside from the fact that it builds bigger objects than the first printer, it has different materials, but what’s unique about it is that Made in Space owns it and we supply a commercial manufacturing service in space both to NASA and the other countries on the space station as well as to commercial entities, research organizations and so on.
So in just the same way that NASA can pay SpaceX to launch hardware on a rocket to space, NASA can pay Made in Space to print hardware. So it’s a really interesting experience. We have a little mission control room where we command the printer. There’s a couple of lucky team members here in the company and their job every day is to go sit in there, and basically have a video link up to the printer, and they’re commanding this robotic manufacturing tool in space.
“So in just the same way that NASA can pay SpaceX to launch hardware on a rocket to space, NASA can pay Made in Space to print hardware.”
Robert: So what are you building and making up there?
Jason: So lots of interesting things. On the commercial end, we’ve had lots of different companies that have come on board to test out different ideas. We had Lowe's Home Improvement, that actually was the very first print that the 3D printer printed, and it was a wrench for the astronauts that Lowe’s built. We did a lot of material science work for a very large polymer manufacturer. We developed a new way to print high-density polyethylene in space. High-density polyethylene is what plastic baggies are made of, water bottles, it’s what most of the packaging on the space station is made out of. It also is something that is extremely hard to 3D print with, in fact, there aren’t really any printers on earth that print with that material. So we developed a unique way to print with that material. This company makes that material, but we can also recycle the old material in space and then print with it.
NASA has printed all kinds of different items from very basic test coupons that come back to earth and get analyzed in the lab. One of the last things NASA printed was a new attachment for the vacuum cleaner. It’s kind of funny but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that one of the first type of items you would see printed in space is not the high-stress, super mission-critical component, it’s the basic everyday components where you just need something and the plastic part works really well for it. Over time, NASA will start to get more comfortable with the process as they see these parts get used and see how their lifetimes work in space and it all lines up really well towards when there’s a journey to Mars, astronauts will have this technology and they can build the things they need as they go.
Robert: I was at ISU over the summer and I crowd-sourced a few questions from people there. They’re wondering about manufacturing with metals in space.
Jason: So we’re doing some work with NASA right now and also a lot of work in-house to manufacture with metals and composites. A lot of the time, we come at it from a different approach than the technology works on earth. If you have a powder bed of metal, that’s a little bit hard to control in space, so maybe there’s a better way to do it. So we’re working on that and we have a new program with NASA called Archinaut, so like architecture astronaut and Archinaut is a spacecraft that we’re developing that goes into space and then robotically manufactures very large structures, like 100-meter structures in space. Antennas, a really good example is the ability to build very large aperture antennas that provide global broadband internet to everybody’s cell phones on the planet. That takes some pretty unique types of materials to manufacture with, metals, composites, sometimes materials that nobody 3D prints with today so we’re inventing new technology to do that.
Robert: You mentioned the first print was with Lowe’s, their innovation labs. Can you tell me a little bit about the history around that because it’s very interesting for a non-space company to be working with a space company? It’s a really beautiful way of demonstrating how potentially you can do non-traditional things with space.
Jason: So it seems surprising at first, like why would Lowe’s be working with Made in Space, but there’s two parts to the answer. One is Lowe’s Innovation Lab partners with companies you would never expect Lowe’s to partner with, to do projects you probably would never expect Lowe’s to be doing. But really, what we’re doing for space is very similar to what you would imagine the retail experience might look like on earth. We’re trying to make sure that astronauts going out into space can have what they need right when they need it. Today, they have to carry this huge amount of spare parts on the space station in case anything breaks, always have a spare part lying around. That’s essentially inventory; they have to carry inventory with them. Now with a printer, you don’t need to carry the inventory, you need to carry the digital inventory of what each parts software is so that you can manufacture it and then you need the material to 3D print with. Wo what we’re developing for astronauts is something that everybody on earth should have, and I think Lowe’s recognizes that and so we’re working on lots of different projects with them to bring that to life. There are even projects like our recycler that recycles material in space and makes new parts with it. That’s something that you’ll see in a Lowe’s store sometime very soon.
“But really, what we’re doing for space is very similar to what you would imagine the retail experience might look like on earth. We’re trying to make sure that astronauts going out into space can have what they need right when they need it.”
Robert: That’s amazing and almost science fiction. Speaking of which, do you have any favorite science fiction that you can share?
Jason: So the book I read over and over again as a kid was Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. That was my favorite book. It was just this amazing story of exploration and of the unknown and I just really loved that. When it comes to space science fiction, a few stand out. Probably my two favorites are Rendezvous with Rama [by Arthur C. Clarke] and Ender’s Game [by Orson Scott Card]. Rama is really interesting to me because my belief is that the best place for humanity, in the long run, is not just on planetary surfaces but in free space inside of giant space colonies that we construct in space. Rendezvous with Rama is a very interesting story that ties into that idea, filled with adventure and unknown and I love that. Ender’s Game, it just makes space really fun, and I could relate a lot to Ender Wiggin when he experiences zero gravity for the first time because of the feelings he went through was exactly how I felt when I got to go in the zero gravity airplane to test our printers.
Robert: What about optical fiber? I know that is sort of a new offering. Are you making that with the AMF?
Jason: So that’s actually totally different. This goes back to the fact that the company wasn’t started to be a 3D printer on the space station, it’s about making things in space. So there are two really interesting verticals to that, the first vertical is the one most people have always associated our company with, which is making things in space for space. Like astronauts in space can make the things they need. We make giant antennas in space for global broadband internet, all those things. But the other interesting area is making things in space for Earth, things that can’t be made on earth but are needed on earth and those are things that exploit the unique aspect of the space environment to make them.
One project is a device that makes exotic optical fiber in space, and the reason that’s important is today’s optical fiber that the majority of the world uses is a silica fiber. It’s extraordinarily cheap because it’s manufactured in vast kilometers at a time, but silica fiber is pretty limited in terms of the spectrum of a wave of light that it can transmit as well as its attenuation, so its ability to push data through that fiber without losses. So it’s pretty limited but nonetheless it still it can hold the capacity we need today, for like long-haul telecom. Now there are other types of fibers that are 100 times better the silica fiber in terms of attenuation, which means 100 times better ability to pass data through it and it covers much more of the light spectrum so, you can have many different wavelengths going through this fiber. The problem is it’s really difficult to make these fibers on earth. The process of making them, it never allows it to get to that perfect optimal quality and notably because gravity actually plays a role in destroying the property of the fiber as it’s being created. It creates defect and voids in the fiber and the reason why is because these fibers are made up of several different heavy metals, fluoride base metals, and they have different densities.
So when you’re heating up this glass rod called a preform and drawing it into a fiber, you’re creating density gradients in that mixture, like it’s close to glass transition temperature and you’re pulling a little hair-like fiber, and you’re getting all these like convection currents inside that glass. When it cools down, those convection currents turn into density gradients, a lot like salad dressing that wasn’t shaken up and you can see all the different levels of oil and oregano and balsamic and all the things. That’s like what you get when you make this fiber on earth. If you can turn off gravity, you don’t get that; you get a perfect mixture. You don’t get convection currents, you don’t get density gradient, and that’s what we’re aiming to do, turn off gravity while we make this fiber to achieve its near optimal quality in manufacturing. Which means that we can make a fiber that is 100 times better than silica and then we can replace those fibers on earth with fiber made off of earth. That’s really important because our belief is that space is more than a place for searching for scientific truth, it’s a place for real business to exist, for industry to exist and historically that industry has always been about sending ones and zeros up and down, just pure bits, it’s just a telecom industry. What we want to do is get to the point where we send atoms, and we’re sending material into space, processing the material into a higher-value product and bringing it back to earth, and when we do that, the industry of space expands.
“We want humans living and working in space and today, you get like three people, six people living on the space station and it’s all government employees for the most part. What we want is to have hundreds and thousands of people living in space and the way you do that is you create jobs in space.”
We don’t start slicing the pie into different slices. We actually expand the pie and make the industry bigger. The real motivation behind why we would do that is that we started this company because we care about humans in space. We want humans living and working in space and today, you get like three people, six people living on the space station and it’s all government employees for the most part. What we want is to have hundreds and thousands of people living in space and the way you do that is you create jobs in space. You can’t have thousands of people living in space if there are no jobs. But people follow the job, so we’re trying to create jobs in space, and we’re going after it from a manufacturing perspective. If we can find reasons for people to be there because they’re helping make things that the earth needs, you’ve immediately just created a necessity for the human expansion into space and that’s what we’re all about.
As a wrap-up, remember to think big but start small. Space is more than for searching for truth – it's a place for business. A way to get more humans living in space is to create jobs in space. We'll dive more into in space manufacturing and other in space activities in Robert's upcoming book. We'll have other exclusives not available in this E-book available at RobertJacobson.com.