NIAC 2021 - Mini Bee Prototype

 Joel Sercel, PhD

All patent obtained or patent pending

Notes by Paul Fischer

Mini Bee prototype to enable demonstration flight in LEO

With our partners at the Colorado school of mines, the omnivore thruster uses water as propellant and light as an energy source

The intent was to create the transcontinental railroad of space

In the past three months alone, we have been able to secure six billion dollars with private company invvestments of 400 million dollars

We have been able to build on mini bee with worker bee which we expect to over take worker bee

Philip Wahl:

Optical mining spals   with solar energy 

Works in tandem with the NIAC phase ii project

Apis mission concept rendezvous with spacecraft and materials

Worker bee orbital logistics

Introducing worker bee carries customer satellites into space with the omnivore rocket engine

This is a breakthrough solar powered engine

Omnivore advantages are lower cost and higher thrust and can run on virtually any propellant 

Nuclear rocket-like propellant combines for a much safer propellant

The mini bee mission will demonstrate lower earth orbit to demonstrate mining technology

A robotic zipper will capture the asteroid and sunlight spalls the asteroid an freezes volatiles

The mini bee demonstrates asteroids

Honey bee will be used to spall the asteroid in deep space

The ground demonstration of minibee vehicle has been developed

Minibee’s optical adventure uses a actualized potential pointing areas during space craft construction

Use of computer vision to 

Inflatable an rigid reflectors with thin aluminum film and the engineering team has designed a rigid reflector with parabolic hexagonal structures

The inflatable subsystem is not capable of …

The demonstration of open capture bag system at one gram is also used

The omnivore thruster concept uses the same optical system as mining to create thrust through the sun’s energy

The omnivore thruster

MK1 test thruster has operational temperatures ranging from 500-950 degrees celsius

Newtons scale thrust values at the impulse of 1/ms

Testing readings are around 60% of the requirements

Next will come flight qualifications of our flight systems

Finally we hope to launch worker bee 26 months later an min bee about a year later

Q: concentrated UV?

A: the silicon is pretty standard practice the polyimid doesn’t see the light, and was a major design driver

Q: was the YKK zipper company an official collaborate and what was the partnership like?

A: space applications of the zipper tech and how to cross fertilize with that, including space suit familiarity with tech

Q: Difficult to evaluate trajectory?

A: a type of mission design that is totally feasible but not used by nasa, that is more adaptive in nature, however, we should know it well enough, it is a pretty unlikely possibility

Q: what kind of materials are used to construct the bags?

A: something interesting about optics says that the intensity of the light scales with the convergence angle, so the volume of space with high intensity almsot like a light saber, otherwise there is no damage, so when it opens up, to where it hits the bag, the light would not be intense enough to propagate and cause damage to the bag. When you calculate the momentum exchange, it doesn’t require that tough of a bag to handle

Q: can we use smaller bags now that we found asteroids to be smaller than we thought

A: we have found that bulk density of asteroids to be significantly less than original estimates, so we need much larger bags now, 

Q: other insight and advice to NIAC researchers?

A: focus on missions, hire really smart people who are highly collaborative and willing to fail, and encourage failure because only through failure is there growth in learning

Q: what components are actuating the reflectors?

A: M1 reflector and M2 actuated by a system that is motor driven screws and a piston movement, would be nice to come up with a sort of design everywhere, the real magic is not the actuators, but the vision system: it turns out if you have. A big reflector that is focused on a smaller reflector and you can keep the two aligned through a simple computer algorithm, like everything we do this is patent pending. We owe our work all to NASA and NIAC, collaboration in a win=win function

Q: in the future where does this concept go for worker bees?

A: like UPS or Amazon delivering spacecraft where they need to do, in the medium term we hope to create low-cost space tugs, and we can be the low cost standard oil of space, but we are really a vision driven company, and we exist because we think the resources of space vastly outweigh the resources of earth, we wish to support a trillion people and are fundamentally a company built on optimism.