Day: April 20, 2023

Water may power the next generation of spacecraft, if a trio of SpaceX veterans has their way.

Brothers Kirby, Robert and Ryan Carlisle plan to harvest water from the moon and use it to fuel future vehicles. They recently closed a $2 million funding round, led by Type One Ventures, to kickstart water propulsion with their company Argos Space. While still a five-person startup, they have big plans for the near future.

They plan a demonstration flight in Earth orbit in 2024, to start commercial service around 2025 if all goes to plan, and to expand to the moon later in the decade. The moon has ample water ice on its surface that could be harvested for future missions. Where exactly Argos will land on the moon will depend on what water resources future spacecraft confirm, whether it be at the poles or in other locations.

Space.com caught up with the three brothers, who worked in a variety of roles at SpaceX before Argos Space, to learn more about their plans for water-powered spacecraft in Earth orbit and on the moon.

Related: Water on the moon is more common than we thought, studies reveal

Space.com: How did the company get start?

Robert Carlisle, CEO: The three of us have wanted to start a space company together since we were children. But then, specifically, after SpaceX, we wanted to do something that would help really expand humanity’s presence in space, with in-space resources. We also wanted to make sure we were making a commercial business, not just a sort of purely future lunar-focused business. I did commercial sales for a while at SpaceX, and one of the things I saw there was how hard it is for really small satellites to get access to orbits beyond LEO [low Earth orbit.]

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Space.com: Tell me about your first vehicle.

Robert Carlisle: The Argonaut is what we’re calling our initial transportation vehicle. It’s named after the sailors on the Greek mythical ship, the Argo. It’s a water propellant vehicle and it’s planned on being fully reusable from day one. It offers high delta [high-altitude] orbits, and on-orbit pickup of payloads.

Space.com: How does the water system work?

Ryan Carlisle, chief technology officer: Basically, you take steam, and in this diffuse vapor form you hit it with RF [radiofrequency] energy or other forms of electric fields. It turns the water into a plasma, which is extremely hot. And from there, it works similarly to any other rocket engine. You have a very, very hot gas heated by this electrical energy and it exits the back of the engine at high velocity. The prototype we made was based on years of research. There are a bunch of published papers going back to the 1970s or 1980s on similar styles of plasma propulsion, including with NASA.

Space.com: Why use water as a propellant?

Kirby Carlisle, chief operations officer: Water has a lot of great properties about it. It’s easy to store in space, It can be used efficiently as propellant. It’s of course necessary for human life. It’s super delicious; my favorite thing to drink. And it is serendipitously available in large quantities on the lunar surface, the closest celestial body to Earth, as well as many other places throughout the solar system.

Related: Hidden water source on the moon found locked in glass beads, Chinese probe reveals

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Space.com: Before you go to the moon, what do you want to do first?

Kirby Carlisle: Our initial target market is this niche of high-energy orbits for small satellites, which is not really well served right now, even with other vehicles and solutions that people call tugs. So our vehicle can actually pick something up in LEO, and then take it out to geostationary [orbit] or cislunar space.

Space.com: So if I’m understanding you correctly, what you’re saying is that you’re going to be launching your tug to a convenient orbit, and then as spacecraft come by, you can snag them and then go up to another orbit, and down again. How would you be refueling them?

Robert Carlisle:  We plan to launch water tanks, initially from Earth, and have them in that same base orbit waiting to meet with the Argonaut after it finishes a mission. Imagine the SpaceX Transporter launches, the big rideshare launches [for satellites]. We would launch an Argonaut and water tank on one of those. 

We don’t want to put too much detail yet into how we’ll catch the satellites, but the key thing is we’re trying to do it without requiring the customer to put any additional hardware on their spacecraft. Our demonstration flight won’t go quite that high, however. We’ll demonstrate the propulsion system and we’ll do some level of of the RPO — the rendezvous and proximity operations — with the payload.

Related: Low Earth orbit: Definition, theory and facts

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Space.com: What’s the plan for your lunar operations?

Kirby Carlisle: Commercial access to the moon and use of limited resources. We’ve always had a bit of a chicken and egg problem: for companies to plan on using whatever resources, someone needs to be producing those resources. But for someone to produce the resources, there needs to be a clear demand. So at Argos, we are creating that demand by turning these resources into transportation, using lunar water as propellant. 

Robert Carlisle: We want to start generating revenue with the [Earth] orbital service. But in parallel, we’re working towards this water extraction. In the late 2020s, we want to be actually using water we harvest from the lunar surface. Then we want to scale up to a larger vehicle, sort of like a 10,000 kilogram [22,000 pounds] payload class. Think of something that could pick up a SpaceX Starship sort of payload in LEO, and then take it out to lunar orbit or to geo[synchronous].

We do intend to partner with lunar lander companies. If we can just build up the harvesting and the extraction technology and put it on someone else’s lunar transport systems, that’s fine for us. We’ll take care of the LEO to lunar orbit part, and back to Earth.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).

Google has found yet another place it can cram in generative AI. The company is bringing artificial intelligence into its marketing business, adding the tech to the services and content it offers to advertisers, according to a report from the Financial Times. “Generative AI is unlocking a world of creativity,” the company wrote in a presentation to advertisers titled “AI-powered ads 2023.”

In the burgeoning age of AI, Google will start generating ads on its platforms using the same sort of large language model tech that powers its Bard chatbot and has already been integrated into aspects of Gmail and Google Workspace. What this means in practice is that ads you see on search pages, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and other Alphabet-owned platforms going forward may not have been created by a human.

Instead, Google’s clients can supply “creative” chunks of disparate content like images, video clips, and written copy for an ad campaign. Google’s AI will then “remix” what it’s given to produce algorithmically advertisements, the internal presentation reportedly explained, presumably to maximize ad efficacy and reach.

The new generative AI offering will be incorporated into Performance Max, according to FT, which uses a rather opaque system of programmed automation to dictate where/when/how ads appear. Already this set of Performance Max algorithms was capable of spitting out basic ad copy. Now, with the addition of Google’s newest AI, that capacity will likely be much greater.

But these ads are undoubtedly set to come with the same problems as other AI-generated content, namely: inaccuracies and manipulative untruths. AI loves to lie, or “hallucinate” as tech companies and researchers have branded it. One anonymous source expressed concerns about misinformation sneaking its way into advertisements with the new AI push. “It is optimized to convert new customers and has no idea what the truth is,” the unnamed person told FT .

Gizmodo reached out to Google with questions about its AI advertisements, and filters or protections to limit the spread of false info. The company did not respond as of publication time. However, Google told FT it has plans and safeties in place to prevent misinformation.

Google isn’t the first company to bring generative AI into its marketing business. Earlier this month, Meta announced similar plans to integrate AI into its advertising by the end of 2023. And previously, smaller companies have used generative AI tools like DALLE-2 and ChatGPT to produce ad campaigns.