Robert, Ryan, and Kirby Carlisle are three engineers who worked at SpaceX during the Falcon 9 era, seeing the revolution in the global launch industry from the inside.
The brothers launched rockets, refurbished rockets, and sold rockets. But when it came time for them to leave SpaceX and start their own space company—a lifetime dream for the Carlisle brothers—they chose not to build rockets. Rather, they focused on spacecraft.
In late 2022, the three Carlisles founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. They chose water, which is potentially harvestable on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, as a means of propulsion.
“We based the company on water,” Robert Carlisle said in an interview.
The availability of water is key to the company’s vision for building a transportation network between low-Earth orbit, geostationary orbit, and the Moon. This would open up a large number of affordable logistics options, such as satellite resupply, refueling, repair, redeployments, and more. And in the company’s vision, water is not just a propellant; it’s also a coolant and radiation shield. Much of the spacecraft, including its thrusters to the avionics, is cooled by water. This helps increase the propellant mass fraction of the spacecraft, meaning more mass is devoted to propellant, allowing the vehicle to go farther and do more things.
“In the long run, this water-based transportation will give us a commercial incentive, a profit motive to go harvest it from the Moon’s shallower gravity well,” Robert Carlisle said.
Argo Space flew its first demonstration mission, dubbed Navigator, in July on a Falcon 9 rideshare. The company successfully made contact with the spacecraft, but one of its two rollout solar arrays failed to deploy. Controllers spent about half a day troubleshooting the issue and gathering data on the spacecraft’s health. Unfortunately, however, the spacecraft remained power-negative, draining its battery. There was not enough energy to test the propulsion system.
