Powering the Future of Space—Beau Jarvis—Phase Four

Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs with the future tech podcast. I have a Beau Jarvis the CEO of phase four, we going to be talking about new developments and basic inspiration. Beau thanks for coming.

Beau Jarvis: Yeah. Good to be with Richard

Richard Jacobs: Tell me a little bit about phase four. What are the first three phases and where does the name come from and what’s the premise of the company?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, it’s a bit of a plain word. So a really the reason why we call an accompany phase four is that we build propulsion systems for satellites that generate propulsion by creating plasma and of course, for those in your audience that may have had a rudimentary physics, they may have heard that there are four phases of matter, right? You’ve got your gas, your liquid, your solid but I think most of us, myself included up until recently, we didn’t really think about plasma. So plasma is the fourth state of matter. And that’s what we use to create satellite engines effectively.

Richard Jacobs: Why wouldn’t plasma be and how was it used in propulsion?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah. If you take a step back, there’s generally two types of propulsion and most folks are familiar with what we call chemical propulsion. So that’s the fiery type of propulsion that you see coming out in the back end of a rocket as it’s launched from Earth to deliver things into space. But the other type of propulsion is called electric propulsion. And that’s more commonly used or pretty much all only used in space that is used where you take gas something like a noble gas like xenon or Krypton or Argon. You excite that gas with electromagnetic wave that gas then becomes highly ionized and turns into a plasma and plasmas to kind of move together so you can direct the plasma, out of the back end of the propulsion system by using an electric or electromagnetic field and then that allows your spacecraft to move around in orbit, in space, So it’s a lower thrust obviously than you get with chemical propulsion. But when you’re up in space, you don’t have the pull of gravity as much as you do on earth and it’s a much more efficient system. So it uses, think of it as a higher mile per gallon system than a chemical propulsion system.

Richard Jacobs:  Do you have creating charges? The charge is gas, essentially the plasma and then the charge separation in a field is charging propulsion?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, exactly, so you know, typically a lot of folks see a rocket and they see the physical nozzle of the chemical propulsion system. We actually use a magnetic nozzle. So basically directing those charged particles direction that we want the spacecraft to travel, so basically directing them out the back that makes space clap. Move in the opposite direction.

Richard Jacobs:  How much more efficient is this method of propulsion like you have, you compare it to other methods of propulsion? Usually in miles per gallon. There is no such thing. What’s the metric that talks about efficiency?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, there are a few metrics that people use and in general it is thrust that’s basically the strength of propulsion. So, obviously, a chemical rocket engine has a much higher thrust than an electric satellite propulsion system does but then there is a threshold for us to efficiency, so that’s really how much thrust can you generate per unit of input. So it’s either an electric power is coupled with the amount of propellant in so it gets fairly complicated pretty quickly. But generally, the idea with an electric propulsion system for a satellite if you want to have enough thrust to move something around the way that it will meet your mission requirements. But you also want to have enough efficiency so that if your satellite, let’s say, you know, you need to last five years or 10 years or 20 years, you need to have a high enough efficiency levels so that the fuel that you’ve got on board, your satellite lasts for the entirety of the mission.

Richard Jacobs:  And what is the source of the fuel?

Beau Jarvis: Yes, A traditional way! A four large satellites on the satellite set to a lot of us, probably don’t think of oftentimes, but when we’re watching television or we’re seeing, news broadcast and the other side of the world, those traditionally bills have been what are called, Geo comsat, so they’re large telecom communication satellites that are in a geostationary orbit. Those typically, you know, we’re an orbit, you know, 10, 15 or 20 years and a lot of times they’re using electric propulsion systems with something called a hoe forester that was actually developed in the 1950s, right in the middle of the Cold War was developed in the Soviet Union. And that takes Xenon, which is one of the noble gases, so it’s an inner gas, pretty safe to handle but it can be a very densely packed gas.

And that is historically, really the only fuel for electric satellite propulsion really what we’re doing differently is we’re still able to generate a plasma just like legacy systems are, but we can use any neutral gas input. So we can use the Annan, we can use really any noble gas, Argon or Krypton, but we can also use novel propelling things like water vapor, things like air, things like methane. And that’s where it gets really interesting from infrastructure and space standpoint, right? So rather than carry an earthbound fuel like xenon on the way out to the moon, if you’re trying to build communications infrastructure around the moon, for example, or further out something around Mars, you can actually use locally available fuels to power in your infrastructure, and that could be, you know, water vapor for a spacecraft or on the moon, that could be methane for spacecraft around Mars. So that’s really the major difference between legacy electric propulsion and what phase four is building is the agnosticism to fuel inputs.

Richard Jacobs:  And they’re just too few particles in space in most places to be able to use that as a fuel. I mean it’s called the vacuum, but you know, there are clouds of gas that are in the way an object’s journey that it could use in harvest

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, that’s probably a little bit further out there. I don’t think it’s outside of the realm of possibility. I think more realistically what you’re looking at is you know, things that are readily available. So when let’s say we flash forward a few years and our friends at blue origin have built up some level of the colony on the moon. For example, they could extract water vapor from some of the ice trapped in the moon and basically make a fuel depot there or on Mars. The same thing the Martian atmosphere has a lot of methane in it. But I think further out, as you mentioned, there is this concept where you have something called a harvester, spacecraft could basically be designed to take in a specific type of gas or really any gas right and convert that into fuel. That concept actually has been started to be developed in with the European Space Agency, not necessarily for deep space missions, but for very low altitude missions. So what we call in a very low earth orbit, anywhere from like two to 300 kilometers above the earth, you can orbit there. But the problem is gravity’s, has a stronger pool there. So if you’re orbiting there, your satellite comes down very quickly just because it gets pulled back into the atmosphere. But if there is a concept out there that if you had a, something akin to a turbo, basically something that light you to suck in air and you had a propulsion system that can convert that air into a plasma like an electric propulsion system, traditionally does, then you could effectively orbit as long as you want it, right? Because there’s an unlimited supply of things like nitrogen, and if that’s a level of the atmosphere. So that concept exists. You know, again, there hasn’t really been a technology up to this point that has been able to leverage different types of inputs to create thrust. So that’s, that’s something that we’re actually quite excited about.

Richard Jacobs:  Yeah. I wonder if you had well, this could work for other planets too, or I guess the moon, and you can make it such that the crafts wouldn’t have to land, but you’d go to lower orbits. Yeah. Use the planet’s gravity or the object’s gravity to pull into a lower orbit where there was enough, if some material methane or whatever it was, harvest that and then leave the plan that would, that extra fuel without having to land. That might be an interesting way to do things.

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, exactly, I think obviously that there’s some technology that has to be developed to get to that point, but again, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility. And you know, one of the exciting things of what’s going on in space right now is that I think really over the next decade, you’ll see a lot of these things that most of us thought was, you know, purely science fiction and start to take shape and come to reality, so that’s it if you’re interested in space, it’s about as exciting as it can be in terms of time.

Richard Jacobs:  Well, what are some of those things? What do you see what’s coming in the near future five, 10 years?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah. I think if you, if you look at it, over the next, let’s say five to 10 years we actually just stick on earth for a moment. I think some of the really interesting things that will require lots of revolutions in technology. So I think that’s where we’ll see lots of things change very quickly, something called these mega constellations and that’s a term that has gone to, that has been developed to describe constellations of satellites, that number in the hundreds or in some cases in the thousands.

And really what you’re starting to see is new companies, if you’ve ever heard of a company called one web or existing space, companies like space x, their concept of basically having a space delivered internet for the entire planet. So basically, no matter where you are on the planet, you could get the Internet.

Now, there’s obviously there’s probably debates as to whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but really an essentially developing these large constellations that orbit the earth, that bring telecommunication down very, very close. So you have lower latency and much broader coverage and you’re actually starting to see larger telecommunications companies look at that and think about, okay, it’s rather than one very large school bus-sized satellite that sits in geostationary orbit for 20 plus years, we can build hundreds of satellites that orbit much closer to the earth and replace them every four to six years. Therefore, we’re not going to get left behind from a technological perspective, so you’re basically going to see, effectively mass manufacturing of satellite starts to take shape, as soon as this year, and then what that means for other parts of the infrastructure that has to go and place, you know, that’s why we exist, right?

As we represent something that can be manufactured at scale and again, that can use various types of fuels to power different satellites. So that’s one of the things that I think, maybe a lot of, kind of you’re my person that’s not in the space industry, might not be aware of, but that is happening right now. They will start to see hundreds of satellites launched on an annual basis, really if you look at numbers I think that’s the last I saw, you know, the number of objects orbiting the earth in low earth orbit I think is around 1700, if I’m not mistaken. But just the number of licenses that have been granted to companies like space x on one web over the next decade, you’re going to see about 20,000 satellites being launched and orbiting the earth. So we were looking at such a step change in terms of things going up and things orbit in the earth.

And then if you start to look out to beyond there beyond the earth, you see people talking about how do we develop this lunar gateway, how do we get a spacecraft to Mars and then get it back again? And what does that mean for infrastructure between the earth and Mars? So I think a lot of the enabling technologies you’ll start to see are going to be pretty interesting just to see how that plays out. And I think the compressed time arises from thinking that this is going to take 20 or 30 years to happen is things are probably going to happen at a much faster pace than all a lot of us are used to. So those are the types of things I’m interested in seeing.

Richard Jacobs:  Okay! Well, what’s the thinking? What’s the purpose of having a normal chance between us and the moon and us and Mars?

Beau Jarvis: You know, I think there’s, there’s, you know, from a scientific standpoint, uh, you know, there’s probably a lot of knowledge that’s locked up, you know, between here and the moon and here in the Mars that we just don’t know about things that could enable deeper space exploration. I think there is that inherent, need to explore a need to discover that is, you know, something that you look throughout history that’s just, why did you have all these people kind of sailing around the ocean? And yes, there are economic incentives of course, but I think there are really interesting scientific questions that can be answered by doing more research into space. And then I think there is the probability, in my opinion, there’s some debate as to, you know, is there purely a commercial reason to go all the way out to Mars? And if you look at it from a purely commercial standpoint and you know, there’s probably like precious minerals, those types of things that exist in space at quantities a much greater than they exist on earth. So, you know, even at that basic level, there’s probably some justification from a commercial standpoint there.

Richard Jacobs:  So your goal is to I mean where do you want to make an impact with propulsion? You said you want to be able to have your system robust enough that it can use multiple different inputs such as methane or water vapor or other stuff all in one go. Or you know, where’s the leverage that you’re working on?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, it really, really the vision we have for the company is that we, we see a future in which all of the mobility in space. So basically, you know, any spacecraft or satellite that’s actively orbiting another celestial body or providing some level of infrastructure in terms of communications or an observation. It is powered by phase four technology. And the reason we think that’s actually a real vision is the hallmarks of our technologies that it’s fundamentally a much less expensive type of system to build. And the fact that we’re not tied to a single propellant input makes it much more flexible and again that contributes both of the lower costs but also to the complexity in terms of different types of missions that a satellite could take using our technology. So for me, that’s exciting.

There’s a mass manufactured angle where we’re going to have to support tens of thousands of satellites, but there’s also the deep space off Earth an exploration angle where the technology that you used to do to help build the infrastructure in deep space. And that’s, that’s pretty exciting.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, so a quick question. You know, when you’re, when you leave Earth’s orbit, you’re headed, let’s take towards the moon. No, you’re in, in space and vacuum, I guess they call it. How many proportions needed? Just a tiny bit and the spacecraft will just keep going and going and going.

Beau Jarvis: Yeah! It’s really, and I’m not a huge fan of these types of answers, but it’s really mission specific. So what does that mean? You know, there are some satellites that they don’t need to move terribly fast or terribly often, so they could have a little trust system with a small amount of propulsion because they don’t really need to use it very much.

There are satellites maybe that are probably, this will become more increasingly more common that are orbiting in low earth orbit where they need to be able to move reasonably quickly because there’s so much stuff in the that orbit, so then they would need to look at a higher thrust system where they would probably use more fuel, so that could effectively shorten the life of that particular satellite. Or they would need to look at other technologies. There are other concepts out there where you actually have a dual propulsion satellite. One is a chemical propulsion system, which basically is kind of like the emergency turbo boost. They get you out of the way of something that’s coming at you very quickly and hopefully, you don’t have to use that very often.

But if you’re in crowded orbits, you may have to use it. But then you have your more efficient, lower thrust electric propulsion system that lets you do, the typical things in a satellite like that has to do like keep its orbit the same as it goes around maintain its position if it’s a network of satellites, those types of things.

Richard Jacobs: Okay! Right. But again going through a based between bodies, here to the moon here, etc. I mean, I guess would you just need a very tiny amount of propulsion of you were happy to go there slowly and steadily?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, exactly. So there are some of the scientific spacecraft that we’ve heard of like Bevy, Colombo, and Marco and more recently a higher Bussa too, which is a, you know, the Japanese satellite that was exploring the mediators. Most of those use of electric propulsion because, you know, they’re, they’re not in a hurry necessarily to get someplace, right. So they can take, take a bit of time. I would think about missions, you know, for example, what space X is building in their starship of that. The need is basically to minimize the time, right? So they’re building a very large spacecraft they can take a lot of fuel on board and get someplace faster with a chemical propulsion system. So again, I think it goes back to wanting to do, but if you’re purely out there in the cosmos exploring and you just want your satellite, for example, to keep going and going and going and you’d probably use a very highly efficient propulsion system, like an electric propulsion system.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, Very good. So what’s the best way for folks to learn more about phase four and I guess initiatives in general. What do you recommend people do to learn more?

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, you know, I mean we are, we’re in the process of building our first product and we’re going to make deliveries to our customers this summer, so we actually have a lot going on. We’re pretty visible on social media on Twitter on LinkedIn. So people want to know specifically what phase four is doing. We’re pretty easy to find. I think, generally speaking, if someone was interested in kind of all aspects of space, like commercial space, NASA related or government-related missions, there’s a lot of really good outlets out there.

One that I look at on a daily basis is space news, it has a pretty easy to follow the news feed, but it’s very diverse. So if you’re just someone who wants to know what’s going on, both from a commercial and a scientific standpoint, and that’s probably a really good thing, a place to visit and or to follow.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, well very good. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Beau Jarvis: Yeah, good talking with you, Richard. Thanks a lot.