Tony Zhou
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hello listeners! Welcome to our latest episode in Series 4 of Longitudes of Imagination. I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University. Throughout this series, we’ve invited members of NASA’s Gateway program to share their experience and contributions of empowering humans to become an interplanetary species. From international relations and policy to engineering and operations, you’ll learn how NASA has teamed up with its international partners — the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, and Japanese Space Agency to set the stage for deep space exploration.

Today’s episode features conversational highlights I shared with Sean Fuller, the international partner manager for the Gateway program. Having built a 24-year career at NASA, Sean now manages the programmatic and technical integration of Gateway’s international partnerships.

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Sean Fuller
My current role, I’m the international partner manager for the Gateway program. And so what that means is both the technical and programmatic integration of our international partners on Gateway. And so those are the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency.

We’re taking a partnership that started with ISS and moving that ahead into what we call Cislunar space with a Gateway, a small station around the Moon. And so my job is those partner elements, as they’re contributing different elements, both modules, in Canada’s case, a robotic arm. ESA has a couple of modules with Japanese components within it for life support and a Japanese resupply vehicle. So it’s both the technical integration of it, how do we get these modules all working together across the Gateway as they meet up in space—very similar to ISS, you attach them in space—but then also the programmatic side of it. The agreements that get into that, how are we going to operate on a day-to-day basis? How do we make our engineering decisions when it’s an integrated vehicle, so everybody has their pieces to it, but they all have to work together and tie together. And so that integration across the deck all falls under my purview and the job I’m doing today.

Tony
I had a chance to read some of the work that you’ve done on this agreement that you talked about, so one of the questions that I had is on collaboration, and working with teams of this size, because you’re also mediating nations as well. How do you go about coming to agreements? Because I’m sure everybody wants a little bit of piece of the pie? And so how do you negotiate in a way where everyone comes out a winner?

Sean
Yeah, absolutely, and I’ll tell you one of the great advantages, I think, of Gateway in our partnership, is it’s not a new partnership. If I go back and look at the Canada case, it actually started with a robotic arm on the shuttle. We started some of our European collaboration as well as Japanese collaboration, in the shuttle program and they grew into the ISS program. And that now 24-year history of ISS, it will be October this year 24 years since the first piece was put into orbit. And so we’ve been working hand in hand with these teams for that amount of timeframe. In fact, a lot of my colleagues from around the world, we started in ISS partnerships and built beyond that. So I say that to say we’ve come to a very common vernacular and understanding of the capabilities and the desires and the goals of each. And that’s really into the foundation of what are our goals are at NASA in the US, in Europe with ESA, in Canada with the Canadian Space Agency, and then in Japan, and how do we dove tail all those together, as we look at human exploration and going beyond low Earth orbit, there’s a lot of similarities there.

There’s a lot of interest in going back to the Moon in the NASA case, or going to the Moon for the first time in our partners’ cases. What we can do there, but then also looking at that not as a destination, but as part of the journey on to Mars.

And so if we all take a step back and look at it, one of the ways you do that is you look at the common goals. We have a lot of common goals, or maybe different ways to get to it. I always try to boil it down to the technical or best answer—many times there’s more than one answer, but the best answer—and then drive it from that direction. I find working with our colleagues around the world through all these years, we know each other very well. There absolutely is – sometimes there’s give and take, but I think that happens in any kind of relationship that you have. But we all know what we’re achieving for at the end, and that’s expanding human exploration. That’s the operations we’re going to do on and near the Moon and also expanding it to Mars. So we always keep that as our focus and understand it is not always a direct path to get there. There’s zigs and zags in the road. We each have not only our technical capabilities and challenges, but in a venture of this size, you have budgetary and political challenges that come along as well, and so we look to really capitalize off each other. You know, Gateway and even ISS was born out of that capability. Certainly, could any one nation probably do this on their own? Maybe not all, but a lot of them could. But is that the best route to go? And is there the funding to do that? And of course, that’s not the case. How do we maximize our resources so that the benefits in the end, each one invests some, but you all gain the benefits and the research at the end.

Tony
Yeah, I mean, it’s really wonderful to hear you say that, because in one of your previous articles that I’ve read, you actually touch on this where you say—and I’m just going to quickly quote you here—is just because someone has a different way of doing things, it doesn’t make them wrong. And there’s more than one path to do things. You just touched on that, and you know, there’s probably much more detail to that. You also touched on the cost of things, and having watched some videos, correct me if I’m wrong, the space shuttle that will shoot into space is going to cost around 2.5 billion because it might be disposable, rather than continuing to reuse the rocket.

Sean
Yeah, it’s different. We’re seeing that SpaceX is in the industry work on the reusability in low Earth orbit made tremendous, great strides in that. As we look at going to the Moon, it takes a significant more amount of energy to do that. When you return something and land it, you’re using some of that rocket fuel literally to bring it back down to earth and not being used to put a mass in orbit.

We look to fly Orion along with, as we call it, co-manifested payloads, which is the Gateway elements. So that one rocket is not only launching a crew, but it’s also launching a 10 metric ton module, take it out to and build up Gateway. And so it’s different environments to do that. So again, there’s different paths to it. But as we look at that and look at the way to maximize it, we really need to focus on that. You know, we flew expendable, I’ll say rockets, for low Earth orbit for many, many decades. And really it’s coming to maturity here in the last less than a decade of that reusability that we see today. I certainly envision that as we continue the exploration and continue developments in those areas that in the future, there will be more components of deep space rockets that will end up being reusable as well. Just today, we’re not at that efficiency level for it, and then so for a large part, you’re getting the maximum use out of it to get the most mass you can out to, in our case, in Moon orbit.

Tony
Yeah. So from your long tenure with NASA, and you are a part of, I believe the Expedition One. What are some lessons that you’ve learned just from starting right immediately, having graduated college, until working now, and the input that you give in each new project?

Sean
Yeah, with each new project I say bring your history and knowledge base for it, but don’t let that pollute the future as well in looking at it. So you’ve got a great background, a great knowledge from it, but you can apply the new lessons and the new ways into a future project. I had the fortunate advantage, I’ll say, when I started working at the Johnson Space Center in ’96, that a year later, because we were learning how to do ISS, ISS hadn’t started flying yet, we had to think on the Shuttle Mir program, we had US astronauts on Mir and saw that as our learning ground to get that base of knowledge into ISS. I was very early exposed into that international partnership and working with them. And so from each one of those, you take those lessons.

The early days of ISS, it was a partnership across the board that we had not operated in that realm on a day-to-day basis with each other. So one of the things I talk about is a comparison, as we evolve ISS and that partnership to Gateway, we have a volume. It’s about 11 volumes of what we call the implementation for ISS, how all the pieces are going to work together between our partners. It’s not just the hardware on orbit, but how, for example, we’re going to do scheduling of the crew day, how we’re going to plan logistics on a logistics flight. In the Gateway, now we’ve got 20-24 years, like I said, of experience. Took all those lessons learned and said, we’re going to take nine volumes of I’m sure well over 1000 pages, we could condense it down to one very concise 50-60 page type document, because we all built on that history we had in the past. We’ve taken a lot of lessons learned, you know, things that we did on ISS that we said, golly, if we had the opportunity to do it again, we might do this a little different. Well, fortunately we have the opportunity to do it again. And in the early days of the Gateway partnership, before we actually formalized our agreements, that’s one of the things we all sat down and said, Okay, we know what the ISS agreements are. If we could do it differently, which we now can, how would we do that differently? And again, we found talking of partnership, some very common things in here that we can maximize. Again, building on those lessons learned for the future. So myself personally, kind of as you go through it, each time you get new opportunities, you certainly don’t forget the past, you build upon the past. And I also tell folks, if you’re going to change something, it behooves you to know why you’re going to change. Change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good thing. But learn from the past, learn from the histories, and if there’s a better way to go try to address something, certainly do that. And I’ve had a lot of those opportunities for better or worse over the years because of my continued involvement in different aspects of the international partnership.

Tony
And so how would you gauge? Because it seems like you’re also talking about elements of decision making. And so are there components or times where maybe you would lean to more risk taking, or are there times where your decision making is a bit more conservative? And so how do you gauge how you handle decision making at a level where I think there’s a lot on the line?

Sean
Yeah, you are right. There’s a lot on the line, there’s not a lot on the line just for myself or for NASA. Well, NASA may be the largest partner in Gateway, for example, all of our other partners have a very vested interest as well. And they have risk involved in it too. And so leveraging on that, everybody in each area, each person brings in a different perspective. And so when you’re balancing all that, not only am I pulling upon our team, our broad team, but also our international team to it as well. Let’s make sure we understand all the different elements that are out there because sometimes I may not see, for example, a decision made on the NASA side and how it impacts my European colleagues. So let’s make sure we have that information out on the table, and then balance that risk amongst us. I’ll tell you, I think you’ll find that doing that, having a very open conversation with everybody, really helps the whole team to understand the different aspects to it, and understand the decision that’s made to get there. Understanding everybody’s pros and cons, that kind of helps you look at it from a big picture. Sometimes I may make a decision that in my silo, just the NASA part, is different than one if I look at the whole partnership and what’s best for the partnership. So pulling in all those pieces is very key. It’s also key to understand the major levers on our partner side because we find that they have similar ones to us from a risk and also from a financial standpoint, but understanding that because you can get wrapped up into the politics, if you will, it’s gonna cost me more than you and whatnot. If you boil it down to the best technical decision, that usually helps lead you to the best answer as well.

Tony
Right. Yeah. That’s very insightful. You know how you said there is a lot of different partners that are vested and interested in this. I think recently UCLA announced their first space medicine fellowship. So there are also a lot of different fields now wanting and becoming more interested in space. How would you give advice to students that may be not necessarily coming from an engineering background, but want to be involved in space? And how to navigate into this field?

Sean
Yeah, there’s a lot of great opportunities out there in that research community. You know, we’ve learned a lot of things on ISS in different areas that we had no idea about. And a lot of fields that are finding the advantage when you take away gravity into things you can do. Medicine is certainly one of them. Structures on materials, in the chemistry realm, that’s another area of things that we’re learning every day on ISS, and we’re learning about future vehicles as well as the things you can do in space. And so I would just say, open your horizons to it. You know, I would imagine, I know myself, when I went through my degree program in engineering. I was an engineering physics major. The thought of eliminating gravity from the equation probably didn’t cross our mind very much. That’s a very powerful thing, when you can eliminate gravity from it, and now what can you do with that, and so I would tell folks in in multiple fields just have a very broad and open mind. It can really, really open up opportunities here, operating in space, we’re seeing it on a daily basis. In fact, right now we have a four crew from the Axiom one mission on ISS. Nonprofessional, if you will, astronauts from the astronaut corps, operating on ISS, doing research that’s opening up a commercial field there for it. So I think you’re gonna see a great expanse in that of opportunities there, and a lot of great returns from it as well, in the future.

Tony
Based on the research, do you think research that’s done in space will impact and advance research done on earth? Or the other way around? Or do you think both will try to complement one another?

Sean
Yeah, I think it feeds both, right. We’ve done some tremendous research, especially in the realm of life sciences research, DNA sequencing on orbit, again, different aspects that we couldn’t do in a lab on the earth, and then that feeds into – so you close that knowledge gap there. And it feeds into the next level of research or manufacturing or development down on the earth, but then it can iterate back up into the on orbit phase, as well as the next step. So I really think that those two feed off of each other. Sometimes you learn the lessons in space, because let’s face it, it’s not cheap, it’s getting cheaper, but it’s not cheap to put stuff into space. And so you kind of learn, and we’ve learned new manufacturing methods by doing that, sure, you could manufacture it in space, but you’ve actually learned it. And now you can apply it on Earth and produce that medicine or the manufacturing on Earth. So I really think that they feed off of each other. And we’ll see that continue in the future.

Tony
With the Gateway program, there are two questions that I have. One is what are some goals and objectives that you want to accomplish over the next course of the while to further the success of the Gateway program, and then two, throughout this program, what are some unexpected things that have caught you by surprise?

Sean
So in terms of, where do I want to see, we’re building hardware now. We’re manufacturing it in Torino, Italy, and out in California with our first two elements are coming together, the pieces to the initial structure and then the pressurized shell. That’s what’s happening out in Italy. It’ll be shipped to the US the latter part of this year. We’ll continue that outfitting, getting the hardware on orbit, assembling an operating Gateway obviously that there is a big milestone for it. We’ll have the first elements in the latter portion of 2024. That will launch in orbit and then adding on beyond that. So I’m very much looking forward to that. It’s going to bring us a different realm of space exploration. Of course, we had the Apollo program in the late 60s and 70s which did great, that showed, hey, we can get to the Moon, we know a lot more about the Moon from that. We get the crew back home. That was really a scouting mission, if you will. Now that we’ve got that, our technologies have matured, our capabilities have matured. Now we’re going out to, if you will, settle in and have a more sustained, as we call it, presence, and so Gateway doing that, enabling the landers to come to Gateway, pick up the crew go down to the surface, bring the crew back to Gateway and use it later again, to go down to the surface for the next group. You know, that’s going to be a great moment, when you really see that, that human exploration now in space has expanded beyond low Earth orbit. And now our cutting edge is out in the Moon vicinity. And we’re using that to get ready for the future. And so I’m going to relish the day when a first crew enters Gateway, you know, that’s going to be a great accomplishment. And then when the next crew comes, and they go down to the lunar surface, and they’re coming back from the lunar surface, that’s gonna be a great thing that’s really taking all these pieces and building that sustainability. And we see that for that repeatability, affordability and sustainability that is going to provide.

So, things along the way that surprised me, one of the great things that I do see in Gateway, in this partnership and with even within NASAs, is you come across a challenge, a block, if you will, but you open it up and a team comes in and attacks it. And before you know it, you’ve got a great solution. And next thing you know, it was that was just a small speed bump in the road, it wasn’t a block along the way.

You know, as we look at things, and one thing comes to mind is refueling and how we’re going to do refueling for Gateway. Well our European partners stepped up on that and said, Hey, we got some things here we’ve been working on that we didn’t know about, that they’ve been working on, and kind of put our technical capabilities together, closed that gap. Okay, that’s great, we got that solved, now let’s move on to the next one. And so we’ve been doing a lot of great things with that.

I’ve seen a lot of interest grow around the world, in potential new partners in the future. And that’s always good to see. Because that again, it shows not only our initial partnership, but it’s expanding it to more than the overall fever, if you will, around the globe of doing this, of doing the expansion and humans returning to the Moon. Being a part of that as not we as one nation, but we as a humanity expand to the Moon, but also like I’ve said, many different nations certainly have their sights on how can we work this together, expand beyond the Moon and get to Mars. And so I think you’ll see a lot of interest in that and seeing nations from around the world that enthusiasm and interest of being a piece of this, being a piece of Artemis, and expanding beyond is always very refreshing.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there definitely is a very human element to this. And there is this heightened sense of, I would say, more importance or urgency around the world. I think a lot of – like we previously talked about, a lot of industries even from fashion, I think that Netflix just like released the recent documentary for a return to space to kind of get more public attention. How do you, when you’re not working, when you’re done with work, bring yourself back down to earth and just enjoy the human parts of non-work?

Sean
They say, you’re fortunate if you have a job that you go to work and enjoy and I certainly do have that. You know, you come home, and there’s pieces of that that come with you too. That is part of that joy. I’ll tell you as a family, we enjoy seeing the space station flyover. I’ve got pictures of my daughters, I’ve got two younger daughters – well, they’re high school now, but when they were much younger, holding them in my arms and pointing to the sky and seeing the space station fly over. So seeing that, our partnership, it expands beyond that to friendship as well. I have travels over to Europe and the folks that we work hard with during the days, but then the nice chance and evenings just to share our family stories and enjoy the time. It’s a lot of fun, you find yourself walking through an airport and you don’t realize it, but your backpack has got your NASA tag on it, because that’s what you use in your travel, and people stop you and ask about it. So you see that all the time. And I don’t think it’s something you ever turn off. But it’s partly because you enjoy it and enjoy being a part of it.

Tony
That’s really incredible. And I think that’s part of why space is such an interesting field for everyone. Because it’s not only advancing tech, but we’re talking about a lot of different issues of humanity, how we can unite as one in a way, and not be in conflict with one another. I think this was super interesting, and really grateful. And thank you for your time.

Sean
Appreciate it, Tony. As you could tell, I am always happy to talk about it. And you know, it’s gonna give us a lot of great opportunities out there. I think it really tells you that humans have a curiosity, what’s beyond the next hill, what’s beyond that next mountain, that was part of our exploration in the US and discovering the new lands to the west, and we’re doing it now. But it’s not on Earth. It’s above Earth. And it’s going farther. It’s going to go to Mars and really expanding human knowledge. And, as you said, it really is bringing folks together for that. And that’s what’s so key.

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Tony
We hope you enjoyed these highlights as much as we did! Personally, I’m incredibly excited for Gateway and NASA’s future projects. With its many international & commercial contributors, Gateway has evolved into a global effort to expand humanity to the moon, and beyond. We humans are innately curious creatures, and to echo what Sean said earlier, “deep space is this opportunity to see what’s beyond the next hill, the next mountain.” Gateway’s success will be a significant moment in history demonstrating how nations united to find solutions for aerospace engineering, habitation, and logistics.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and in the comments, or write to us at podcast@Longitude.site. We would love to hear from you. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.