The presentation will focus on understanding how to live and build in space using programmable gravity spacecraft.
Despite decades of human spaceflight, we still don’t know anything about whether humans can grow crops, stay healthy, have children or manufacture in partial gravity environments. We don’t know the “shape of the curve” that connects our existing knowledge of both zero gravity and full earth gravity. But that’s the curve that both the Moon and Mars exist on. Plus, we need to know if there is a gravity threshold below which life struggles to adapt…because we don’t want to find out the hard way. This problem is blocking our progress as a potentially multi-environment species.
GravityLab is creating artificial gravity services to understand the environment between zero gravity and Earth gravity, such as lunar (0.17g) and Martian (0.38g) gravity, by developing the world’s first dedicated artificial gravity spacecraft and services. We accomplish this by building and launching satellites that deploy long, proprietary booms (20m and longer), which then rotate end-over-end at controllable rates and lengths. The variable centrifugal force enables us to simulate any gravity level. We call it programmable gravity.
This talk will describe our roadmap of gravity labs–gLabs–which begin with small microsatellites, and then build to larger sizes and incorporate the ability for sample return. Our spacecraft are designed to scale to larger payloads over time, eventually to small space stations, all in pursuit of solving “the gravity prescription” for living and working in space and on other planets.
Grant Bonin
Grant Bonin is an aerospace engineer specializing in space mission design, spacecraft systems engineering, project management and business development. His accomplishments have included contributing to more than 50 space missions with 100% success rate, direct responsibility for >$100m in space systems and product sales, and multiple world-first missions spanning formation flight, non-traditional signal intelligence, and cislunar exploration and development.
He was a systems engineer and manager at Canada’s Space Flight Laboratory before becoming Chief Engineer and eventually CTO of Deep Space Industries. Following DSI’s acquisition, Grant became Chief Engineer and Employee #1 of Rocket Lab’s Space Systems Division, which has now grown to account for more than two-thirds of their revenue. Before his current company, he was SVP of business development at Spaceflight Inc.
He co-founded gravityLab in 2022 to explore and exploit the different environments of partial gravity, of the sort we’ll find on the moon and Mars. His overall passion is to help humans thrive in space by learning how and where we can live, work and build things in our solar system.