EP 58 — Advanced Space’s Bradley Cheetham on Using Orbital Mechanics to Cut Mission Costs

Advanced Space CEO & President Bradley Cheetham's journey from a PhD student at CU Boulder to successfully putting a satellite around the moon demonstrates how small, innovative companies can lead space exploration with minimal capital. In this episode of DIB Innovators, Bradley shares with Dave how his 14-year journey began with a purpose to enable the sustainable exploration, development, and settlement of space. 

 

Rather than building hardware, his team focused on creating technologies, capabilities, software, and mission design solutions that didn't require giant rocket factories or satellite production facilities. This approach led to operating the CAPSTONE mission (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation experiment): a microwave-sized satellite that's been orbiting the moon for over two years in a novel orbit never used before, pathfinding NASA's Artemis program for under $30 million without outside investment.

 

Topics discussed:

 

• The counterintuitive approach of focusing on enabling technologies instead of hardware manufacturing, allowing Advanced Space to grow from 12 to 100 people and reach the moon without venture capital by reinvesting customer revenue into strategic capability development.
• How Advanced Space's focus on advanced astrodynamics reduced mission costs by 75%, transforming what would have been a $120M+ traditional mission into a sub-$30M pathfinder by designing transfer orbits that accommodate smaller spacecraft with less fuel.
• How the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS) solves the Deep Space Network's bandwidth limitations by establishing satellite-to-satellite communication, successfully demonstrated by linking with the decade-old Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that was never designed for such interaction.
• Why this unprecedented orbit solves multiple lunar mission challenges simultaneously, providing constant Earth visibility, minimizing solar eclipses to prevent spacecraft freezing, enabling access to any point on the lunar surface, and facilitating efficient Earth-Moon transfers.
• How Advanced Space recovered from two near-mission-ending anomalies by leveraging NASA partnerships and attempting never-before-tried techniques, including successfully freezing and thawing propellant in space when conventional recovery methods failed.
• Advanced Space's years-long development of machine learning and neural networks for satellite operations, moving beyond theoretical applications to successfully demonstrating these technologies in lunar orbit two years before the current AI boom.
• Why the future of lunar exploration depends less on individual mission capabilities and more on developing autonomous operations, communications networks, and navigation systems that can overcome Earth-based infrastructure limitations as mission frequency increases.