The Space Industry in 2024, and How to Build a Satellite Company 01:19:25

hello acq two listeners your one and only cohost Ben Gilbert here today my cohost is on podcast patternity leave which gives me the opportunity to try this solo and i think itll be a lot of fun i was trying to think what acq to episode what i want to do where i could really nerd outwithout David keeping me in line and the answer is the space ecosystem and this is one uh ive already seeing a Austin whois with us here today chuckling on the other end this is an area that weve covered on acquiredits been a while we did the Spacex episode and then we uh interviewed rob Myers and first or the history of blue origin a few years back， but we really havengot an update on the space industry and its inaryor i personally spend a huge amount of my outsideofacquiredtime， especially with the company that Austin is the co founder of the Starfish space， so we are joining today by Austin link who has generously volunteered to give us a primer on the state of the space ecosystem today， so that is where we are Austin link welcome to acq to im excited to be here when you need to nerd out on something call the space focus for ready people ask me what i like about starfashion？

my first answer is usually that board meetings are about 40 percent physics lessons and then we have to do a bunch of approvals but at least i i get to take a college physics class again the physics is where all the final comes from i find the same thing i wish i could do a little more the physics now but as you grow thats outgoes yeah well， we will get into starfish later and all the cool stuff you guys are doing but if i ask you the very hard to answer generic broad question of what economically happens in outer space today howdoes that whole world breakdown？

theres a lot of different values in reasons to go to space today some of them are are purely economic that like you can the dollars in sense in it is a value providing service， someone a commercial sense， someone supportive government folks， and then there are a few reasons to go to space that can be a little harder to quantify starting at at just the most basic， and there are services that are provided from space that make money as companies today， many those were familiar with satellite tv， satellite radio， satellite Internet， satellite Internet in particular with the rise of Starlink over the last couple of years is incredibly exciting as an emerging market， theres a lot of observation thats done from space sometimes， thats done is commercial companies sometimes， its done through the government oftentimes， its pointed down at earth sometimes， its pointed out and i think you can get into a number of government projects that are in fulfillment of scientific goals things like the James web telescope that when up recently， that are incredible value that you can get from space and uniquely from space some of the scientific missions are a little harder to track heres the dollars that that you make i would maybe broadthese we think is the value we can get into or that you can get from space there is both commercial value， and that something that focus are increasingly exploring today with the commercial space industry and then there is value and support of government groups， whether thats nasso， whether thats the space force， which is relatively new is an organization， still and some of those can be supported by focus in a commercial new space world as we call it in the industry， and some of that is through a a traditional space approach that is something that that humans have been doing for seventy years now so one question i want to start off with is give me the baseball card on the space industry right now what numbers get thrown around in terms of market size how many satellites are out there today whats in goverses Leo vs what is meao were gonna do a lot acronyms today so what are all these things there are series of projections that say spaces the trillian dollar market place it at some point in the twenty thirties what is a translate into an inwhats going on today？

there are two realms where satellites are most commonly used by humans there is Geo stationary orbit， which is an orbit is that is unique because the orbit rotates at the same rate that earth rotates below it so in effect a satellite is hovering over given point in the sky and those are like really far away right Geo is a if you were to look at it relativeto the distance to a Geo stationary satellite is about six times earthsradius so dramatically farther out than the radius of earth you contrast that with a low worth orbit satellite the distance to a low earth orbit satellite is a lot of times five， 670 kilometers above earth surface， which is really just about ten percent of earthsradius away， and those are two distinctly different realms that have distinctly different values， but they can be of different uses for communications satellites for observation satellites there are also uses for space that are very popular outside of those orbits in in between those two in mid earth orbit you have a lot of position navigation in time in constellations， like gps， like Galileo over in Europe those are used throughout a series of industries in a really a stable in a backbone of modern life in the us and then theres a series of missions that go beyond Geo stationary orbit from the farthest reaches of the solar system if you look at the old voyager missions to the James web telescope， which is at a legrange point looking at the universe around us to the artemissmission， which is aiming to put humans on the moon again for the first time in over fifty years？

what are some other things that people are trying to do in space？

over the next twenty thirty years？

but are not a part of the space economy today？

theres a lot of excited things that people are aspiring to do in space ill tell you a fewer the ones a getme most excited there is recently talk about space based power generation and you can generate power in space and then sended to earth for for usage on earth that can be more mobile than a power station based on earth because you can send the power to different areas you can generate solar power twenty five hours a day rather than ten hours a day i think thats really exciting theres a lot of on orbit manufacturing thats been discussed there s there s focus exploring can you make drugs in zero gravity？

can you make optical fibers in zero gravity？

can we make those and then bring them back to earth？

whether thats through a space station or through its own dedicated satellite and then theres a lot of exploration that people are looking to do in space and there are people doing exploration activities in space right now， there are rovers on the surface of Mars there are humans in the international space station but there is a lot of talk about especially as we look into the twenty thirties can humans explore even more can we make it back to the surface of the moon？

can we do things on the moon？

can we establish a permanent presence there and and someday can we do more as as we had out another areas of solar system and and as we do all of this， i think fundamentally underpending that is a change in how we develop infrastructure into space i think part of that is something that folks are very used to today， which is a change in how we launch satellites and launching satellites in a more regular and more affordable manner to allow us to get more into space and i think a part of that is a type of activities that we do it starfish base， which is taking the material in the objects that we have in space and figma how do we do more with that and that can start with extendingthelife of satellites to get a little bit， more from them or managing space to bree so that you dont have hazardous risks in collisions that could tear up your infrastructure from the inside out and an eventually， it extends to a world where were trying to send things into space to take advantage of it and its really expensive to lead gravity well， lets do more with the things that we put up there lets recycle the materials， lets reuse the materials， lets take advantage of materials that are already into space both the getting things into space more affordable in faster and doing more with the things that we have in space is a key infrastructure to allow us over the next twenty thirty years to build significant new capabilities for humans as we go out in the universe， yeah continuing with the sort of primer baseball card questions how many satellites are in low earth orbit vs in geosynchronist today geosynchris orbit is an orbit for exquisite satellites so theres on the order of five six hundred satellites in due station or orbit， a lot of times user satellites at cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch， and are providing a lot of value for the the focus that they serve hundreds of millions for one satellite for a single satellite yeah， wow， uh a lot of times you government level ones can can reach into the billions of dollars in low worth orbit there has recently been a rise of large constellations of satellites so you provide services with a network of a hundred or a thousands satellites and you can see focus like Spacex， star link or one web who really pioneered this that has led to in lower thorbit there are now thousands of satellites i i think its on the order of six or seven satellites in lowerthorbit right now that tend to be a little bit smaller a little bit more affordable although there are not a small as they used to be they would have been projected to be five ten years ago thats right there was sort of that rise of this notion of a cube set these like tiny little ones that we could we could put up there that doesnseem to be much of the conversation today yeah， cube sets are amazing you can have a satellite， the size of a basketball， and you can send it into space， and you can have a university lab with students build a satellite incentive to space we have interns a joint starfish base that have launched satellites before， which is amazing it turns out thats a form factor that its difficult to do much useful and satellite that is that small and so focus like us at starfish tend to set law on satellites that are the size of maybe a dishwasher or a microwave various kitchen appliances。

which i get mocked for using to describe the size of satellites i love it and then one more level setting question on satellite numbers you said 67 万 today in low earth orbit most of those six or 7 have come in the last fiveyears and that were continuing to see thousands per year launch right？

yeah， most of the six or 7 have probably come in the last two years even its really been a dramatic change in the rate at which satellites are launched and that something that we have more of a head of us as new launch vehicles like new gland from blue origin or voken from ula or in particular starship from Spacex come online and and make it easier and easier to get satellites into space and it opens up new value propositions in the crucial world。

new business cases and what is launch capacity？

look like today， globally like how does one get to space is it the way most people are imagining were sixty percent a launches come from space x and then theres everyone else if you want to launch to space？

today especially if youre in the position of a company like Starfish space you go on Spacex and Spacex its really incredible what they have done over the last twenty years in the industry， there are other folks that launch rockets， rocketlab firefly there are four in governments like the Indian space agency and there are new launch vehicles coming online， but Spacex has made it more affordable theyve made it on a more regular time cadence， and it means that every four months there is a bus going to space they call them the transporter missions and if you want to send up a demonstration satellite， or if you want ascend up a prototype satellite， you hop on one of these transporter missions and theyll send you to orbit and once you prove your technology out youready to send up more than you can buy a full launch field go from Spacex its very slick boy i but a Spacex launch slide within the last several months they sent me a link to go to this website to buy a slot and i said are you telling me buy in a rocket？

slot is going to be like buying a plane ticket then it was easier than buying a plane ticket we had a fifteen minute meeting to buy a slot for our satellite to go on a rocket and the last ten minuteswere just us looking at each other was it really this easy this is all we have to do do you put your wiredetails into like a web form yeah， you just you just type in this is our satellite this is its name i would like these two settings and not these other two settings for you know what size my satellite is going to be and then you signed the contract and then you send the money and youdone it was amazing it was so fast and so these transporter missions i just looked it up Spacex did 96 unches last year？

which is not there doing that weeknots and so once every four months is a rocket that is not like exclusively sold to one customer its sold to how many different customers are on a transporter mission there are sometimes a hundred plus satellites in a transport mission and some of them will come from a given customer， but that means there are several dozen customers on any given transport mission so for anyone whos sort of following all the developments of the space industry and is looking at starfish and varda and a lot of these satellite companies its very fun when one of these transporter mission goes up， because you see like ten names of companies， you recognize and its a big milestone day for all of those companies， because theyre all putting something in the space that over the next one to six twelve months is going to accomplished something that meaningfully movees their company forward its almost an industrywide celebration on those days when we win up with our autopub satellite last summer。

it was the same rocket that barter sent there for satellite up on and im calling friends from grad school who at varda and a bunch of other companies。

and we all sent our satellites to space on the same rocket we all get to celebrate together very cool maybe contextualize this question for me and for listeners when you look at the way， the spaceindustry like industry， private commercial operated ten or fifteen years ago versus today？

what are the biggest differences i think the biggest differences we look back ten or fifteen years is the rise of of what in the industry， we often call new space and we contrast new space first old space and thats probably unfair to the old space side to call it that but if you look at fifteen years ago if you wanted to get a job in the space industry， you look to nasa， you look to large prime contractors like lockid Martin or Bowie or northormen i started my career coming out of grad school working at lockid and at the time there were a couple of small up and coming new space companies space x bleu urge and that were starting to think about space a little differently and starting to move with a different set of incentives those have become the new space companies that move a little faster that operate as more traditional commercialbusinces have become a lot more popular over the last ten fifteen years and theres a lot of awesome success stories to look to like planet or rocketlab or spire or black sky here in the Seattle area， those companies are really exciting i think if you step back and look at the space industry， though its important to remember how much is still done by the traditional large players in the space industry， the biggest thingsgoing on or some of the biggest things going on in space right now include the states launch system run through nasa with a generally very traditional set of prime and subcontractors building that rocket the sls is the rocket that is sort of the platform for the rdemissmission to the moon right exactly and its a its a very traditional nonreusable large expensive rocket and by some metrics is the most powerful that is ever flown to orbit it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to develop other programs that are ongoing include other fastits of the artemist programs such as the Orion capsule， theres a lot that is going on on the defense side and the organization of the space force in the last few years has really highlighted the scale of satellites in the scale of activities that us now lied defense are doing in space thats still the dominant portion of the space industry and it is still lay space industry that we can get really excited about the things that are going on today but i still think the paces at which the space industry is moving pales in comparison to the things that happened in the nineteen fifties and sixties in early seties when humans went from having nothing， ever reached orbit to have in humans on the moon in in twelveyears， thats an insanely fast timeline and thats incredibly rapid movement we dont always move in quite that same way now i think that thats where the role of new space companies and commercial companies come in we can take some of the technology and incredible capability thats been developed but by building business cases around them we can do it at a price point where the value proposition actually works for customers to use the services whether that is communications services or gps services or earth observation or rk satellite servicing you want to do something if the benefits outway the costs and uh big part of our role in the commercial space industry is to make the cost make sense this a great tep so you in your cofronder trever were at bleu origin working on new Glen？

which is the big big rocket the latest in greatest from blue origin and you decide its time to leave and start a company how did you pick what to start and what are the sort of technical underpinnings on what became starfish well？

theres multiple factors are going to starting a company there is both what is the idea that were going to pursue and maybe thats best set is what is？

the idea that wegoing to pursue initially because any time that your building a business you learn and things evolve over time our idea back in 2019 when we started， Starfish is very similar to what were developing now， which is basically a satellite that can grab and move other satellites in space and of course。

it can。

and that initial idea is is something that treveronias we thought about problems and looked broadly at the space industry， said boy， this is this is a capability that will be useful in the extended future as humans build out new structures in satellites in telescopes at a larger and grandscale than weever done before and its also going to be something thats useful today if you need to move satellite around to extend its life or to dispose of it space to bree theres a part of you that is going okay， is there a useful value proposition here in the services that we provide theres also， a part of you that is just deciding about starting a company in general its its a great call to call your parents and say you guys remember all of the things that youve done for me and how really do you are that i am now an adult that like can take care of myself and you dont have to worry about on an hour and hour basis anymore what if i didnt make any money， because i was started my own company and you you worry about me every hour again and i think what gave treveni confidence to go out into the space industry and start a company with that we look that a lot of other founders that were starting to companies whether that is rocketlab or planted or relativity or made in space and end people went out and built business cases in raised capital in one contracks and delivered solutions for customers and that was amazing it was amazing to see the potential impact that that gave them on changing the way that humans can go out in the universe and we said we wanted to be a part of that alright so just so we dont bury the lead here and cause i think this is insane starfish spaces product is a spacecraft that looks like a minifridge is。

but the size of a minifridge it is an autonomous little satellite that goes up and uses electric propulsion to approach another satellite and then use electrostatic docking， so it doesnt need to have bespeciallycustom design to doc it can doc with a variety of materials to reo lightly nudgeup to that other satellite grab it and then either push or pull it to change its position and either extendits life， which i can be worth you know tens of millions of dollars if your satellite runs five or ten years longer than you expected it to or safely do orbit it oh and it does all this at one tenth the cost that it used to take the sort of old way of docking with an and maneuvering satellite did i get the general just right yeah！

if you watch a science fiction movie， you will see two ships come together in the space and interact in one way or another and its such a stable of how people envision the far of future that it will happen in any scifi movie that you watch in reality thats a much more difficult problem than it appears on the surface because two satellites in space are moving several kilometers per second faster than a speeding bullet and our challenge in doing our mission is to have one satellite， one speed in bullet comeup to another speed in bullet and have them come together in a way that is so gentle that both of them can continue to safety operate afterwards and the physics is also nonlinear because youre not moving in a straight line youre orbiting around the earth the same time so just in case you thought you like could use x and y and z coordinits its yeah you thought oh this is just too normal speed in bullets coming together， but theres a little extra trick to it to its a problem that it were not the first one to solve sata teams of doc objects in space for sixty years its just taken really large and complex systems to do that and so at starfish we are using as you mention autonomous software， using electric propotion to bring satellites together with a much more sofforcapable， but a much less hardware， complex vehicle， and it allows us to do missions that generate unique value for customers the core mission that all highlight here is what iv refer to a little bit as life extension and it turns out for a number of large satellites they run out of propellant at the end of their lifetime and you have to retire a functioning satellite because you dont have any propellant onboard anymore and these could be satellites that be you know well operating enable a business to charge customers for telec medications or for satellite tv or you know， yeah， several of them are making several tens of millions dollars revenue year the life extension mission is not one that we invented northern gremen begin doing a life extension mission in 2020 年， and its amazing its an incredible credit to them that they are successfully doing this mission theyre getting paid sixfive million dollars to extend the life of a single satellite for five years， which is representative of the incredible value that you can do if you perform this mission for satellite cerin space and thats why why weve gone out to build a business around thismissionanothersimilar missions and why the space industry can be a really interesting industry as we develop capabilities because one asset in space， one piece of infrastructure in space is providing so much value that tends of millions per dollars of year revenue were coming in many space companies that i talk to their pitches oh！

well， because of technology advancements and cool things we figured out and the price of launch coming down， we can do this for a tentful cost of traditional defense primes would have been charging twenty years ago when they first figured this missionouter sixty years ago when they first did a mission like this， what are some of the step change cost reductions that enable starfished to do it does at the end of the day？

we solve problems with software and sort of hardware， and i think this is a trend that focus i across a variety of different industries right now that things it used to be really complex， hardware can now be software enabled hardware and that ads extra capabilities into a system and for us as an example， our software is capable of docking a satellite with a single thruster on board previously， dockingwouldof taken dozens of thrusters sticking in every direction off of a satellite by not having dozens of thrusters by having a single thruster we can save an credible amounts of mass and our fundamental problem in the space industry is that were in a gigantic gravity well， when we have to get things to orbit for it to be the space industry and saving lots of mass by removing a bunch of thrusters from the satellites allows us to build a satellite that is much more economical to go to space work can fit on a broader set of rockets to go to space theres a lot of value that we can then provide because we solve our problems with software answer to hardware alright。

so let me play devils advocate sounds great to just use one thruster but if i had ten， it would give me a lot more flexibility to make sure i really nailed being in the right place， at the right time， at the right orientation， going the right speed the sound impossible to only have one thruster and be able to do that right why is that not impossible if you had ten thrusters？

you probably could do this better， but you can do it with one thruster and its tricky a lot of timesyourthruster， which is moving the satellite by throwing massout the back really fast and in the case of electric propulsion。

what is it throwing？

it is throwing xenon！

which is a Nobel gas outthe back and this is different than like when i watch a space movie and i see like its brain chemicals out of world。

uh yes， so a traditional threster that people are look to have chemical thresters in a large plume and that pushes hard on a satellite， but its not very good gas mileage and if you use electric propoltion， which people use pretty widtheythrought the space industry， this is nothing unique to starfish but if you use electric propotion rather than making a fire that expels gas outthe back， you are ionizing individual particles of xenon or crypton or some other global gas but as you ionize individual particles of xenon， you then pass them through a really powerful electric field and you accelerate them to high velocities anywhen， you accelerate them to really Hive velocities thats a lot of gas smiling yougetting a lot of momentum exchange for small pieces of mass， but with an electric propotion trustor， you can only do that with a finite number of particles in any given time which means the force that you are using to push on your satellite is the same force as a housefly sitting on your hand its really incredibly small amount of force and to make a change it takes a long period of continuous force to change your orbit thats difficult to doc a satellite with OK， so if you can just drip xenon out the back real slow it puts a large owness on you to uh do your route planning very well to sort of be a good navigator and thats i assume why when you say its the efficiencies are done through software thats what youtalking about yes and and for us that is is aerospace industry we call that guidance navigation control and its really a set of mathematics that are controlling your satellite allowing it to operate autonomously and to get to a point where you are comfortable with these algorithms in the software running your satellite you have to run it thousands and thousands of times on the ground against real physics so of you look at the way that we developed starfish， and this is not unique to the way that we developed starfish， this is something that if youdoing a good job， developing this type is software youre doing it throughout the industry we will build a series of physics models with ever increasing fidelity we will go run our algorithms through those physics models a thousand different times with a thousand different slightvariations in which you call a moneycarlow simulation and you come out of it and say look， this 95 percent of the time it worked perfectly out of these other five percent， four percent of the time it detected all right somethings going on lets abort and get out of here safety， and then one percent of the time it didnt detect in it had an error that we would definallynot want to see in flight lets go diven and figure out whats going on there and at the same time that youre progressing the algorithms to make sure that they can handle all the physics you have to also get your physics to a point where you can trust the physics so we have a satellite on orbit right now the other pop satellite is designed to demonstrate a bunch of technologies and gather a bunch of data for us to use as we go forward as a company one piece of data that is really interesting and really tricky to just calculate on the ground is the effect of drag on your satellite and you dont think your satellite should experience drag its in space theres no air in space but it does experience just a little bit of drag because youre going at incredibly high velocities and there are a few particles of gas that are still in the very extended regions of us atmosphere at five or six hundred kiloms off of the surface of earth and your drag depends upon how many gas particles are in that region of space on that day at that time of day？

and how exactly is your satellite oriented？

and how is the other satellite that youoperating around oriented？

and what is the difference between your two satellites？

drag profiles and if youre gonna go doc with the single threstoii， you have to fold all of that in your calculations that are all happening autonmously on board because youre never quite sure when youre going to get a pass with the ground station， so that you can talk to your satellite and we gathered a bunch of data on this with our other pub satellite thats on orbit and we folded into new our physics simulations and it gives us a better physics model so that as we go run are ten thousand cases you have increased confidence that your algorithms are being tested on as close to realifephysics as possible or as close to real life physics as necessary and you have increased confidence at your algorithms are going to work when you deploy them to space to go doc another satellite so what are the list of things？

what are the reasons？

why everything youre doing at starfish at the cost that youdoingthem could not have been done twenty years ago。

there are a lot of things that we had start fish used are unique to the last twenty years some of them are fundamental to the space industry affordable launch the decreased size of satellites some of them are fundamental to that the way that technology is developed now days when we simulate ten thousand money carload cases we do it on cloud infrastructure， and we have to do it in a particular way， because some of our data is export controlled， but it allows you to simulate ten thousand cases by in theoryspreading them to ten thousand different computers， which we could never have set up on our own here diff meaningful costs around simulation we have actually pretty substatic cost around simulation， and thats because you have to play out the physics with enough fidelity to be confidence trialgorithms work， and you have to play it out over a time horizon so that you can see your satellite transitioning between the various things that it is supposed to do and you wanted to play out as fast as possibly because thats your development cycle is you go an implement a new algorithm and then you go run a test case on that algorithm and you get feedback on whether or not that algorithm is working the way that you want it to at level of compute capability and also the level of software infrastructure that were developing on because we ride a lot of our algorithms in in python and we use capabilities that are developed in python and it would be very difficult to do using the languages and tools that we would have had twenty years ago to work with all of that enables us as a relatively small team to develop faster and more accurately and more powerful capabilities that is true across technology stacks in many industries， and then at the same time， we can use the things that are may be unique to our industry， such as reduced launch cost， such as smaller satlights， and what is the team size just to give people a sense we have about fifty folks here at starfish base overall working on the flight algorithms team， which is really focused on the guidance devigation control software to safely operate around other satellites about twenty people， which in many ways， thats thats a lot of people to be working on any given project but if you compare that with the scale of traditional government programs， there are you ten thousand people working on the space launch system， one way or another indirectly in any given year and so to do something interesting a notable in space with the team of fifty people is is it totally unique capability to the last decade and fifties even generous i mean how many people did it take to actually work on the the other pup program when we started the outer pop program， we run around the entire company to pick a key supplier and there were nine of us thats all there was to vote on who this supplier was？

and this was 18 months before outer puppwent to space that to me is the sound byte a nine person team can do everything from the software to vendor selection to getting on a rocket and then eightemonths later have a spacecraft in orbit that is so fundamentally different than anything thats ever existed before in the history of this industry。

it really is and its really powerful to allow you to go experiment and try things and learn what works and what doesnt and use that to build products and services that provide value to people， whether that is as a business or you could do the same thing in a government organization if you had already powerful small team at the jetpropotion laboratory working bernasa。

you could do a lot with just ten people today and and thats amazing so just a finish on the other question are there things on the spacecraft itself that are just so much more powerful than what we had ten fifteen twenty years ago that enable this technology that happens today at the cost of does will we take advantage of advances in compute。

hardware on the ground but also， on the spacecraft itself and it can sometimes be tricky to take advantage of the leading edge of capabilities in space because theres a set of environmental challenges that are unique to space that are always designed for on the ground operating in a vacume operating， without gravity operating， without air to take heat out of your system operating environments that have additional radiation or a broader range of thermal conditions that it might be subject to see youre not just grabbing like the the latest ingreus snaptag and thats going in the new Samsung phones and using that to power your spacecraft you can try but a lot of times you will be unsuccessful in doing one of the key challenges that say we study for the order as we send the order up is what level of cpu gpu capability can we have on board and and we need balls and we have to go do dedicated radiation testing we have to go do dedicated vibration testing to be confident that whatever we send up is going to function in the way that we needed to in an on orbit environment and if you dont do that you can have things that just shake a part during the vibration that is inherent to going up on a rocket to space you can have objects that are constantly resetting。

because theyve been exposed to high energy particles in space those are real hick upset of causesatlights to fail hmm well listeners this is the perfect opportunity to introduce a new sponsor here on ack two quarter there new product quarter pro launched about a year ago and is already adopted by several fortune five hundred companies and some of the worlds largest hedgefunds and equity research departments yeah！

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yourself and what could you work with venters for we felt as a small team that we have to do things ourselves if they dont already exist out in the industry， so im sure we could find someone and tell them we need a piece of hardware that can grab on to another satellite and sort of try to specify it and code design it and ask them to do the work for us， but that adds a lot of layers an overhead and we would rather controlthat in house， know that we have the best folks working on it know that they have all of the best information available to them to work on it and in part i mean that the grabbing mechanism was travers。

phg thesis so also！

like i dont know who you would outsource that to there are pieces of that there are key technologies though that we do in house because of that and some of that is on the software side a lot of the guide is navigation in control some of that is on the hardware side the mechanism to grab on to another satellite theres a robotic arm in effects that we develop in house because its unique to arm mission an even the high level satellite design and the way that it is optimized in the vendor selection or all things that are really unique to our mission and we have to do in house there are a lot of things especially the modern day space industry that you dont have to do in house you can go by reaction wheels from other people and reaction wheels are big spinning heavy wheels that are on board your satellite that you can just get literal flywheel right？

yeah the business community has coopted this term。

but is this is a flywheel to yeah yes and so as you adjust the rate of vertation on that will you can adjust the rate of rotation on your satellite because of conservation of angular momentum and you can point your satellite in different directions and a lot of satellites have reaction， wheels or something like them and you can go and by reaction wills off the shelf and plug them in your satellite that means that we dont have to develop reaction wills at starfish space and you can go and by cameras off the shelf and that means that we dont have to develop space grid cameras here at starfish space and the infrastructure that is around us in the space industry is infrastructure that is still in some ways being set up and to be frank thats where we have faced a couple of challenges on our other pop mission is that the infrastructure around us maybe wasnt quite ready for the use cases in which we were using it but the development that the infrastructure around us has had is what makes it possible for us is a nine person team to begin working on a satellite mission because we can call up somebody and say listen we want to buy one of your one of your satellites and weve going to have some things that were going to screw on to it and a lot of software that were going to load output to it and were going to prescribe a camera and a threster for you， but having them already able to make satellites means that we can move faster by taking advantage of the development that theyre doing and also take advantage of the heredits that after digital who is our partner for the other pop one mission has flown fifty satellites plus in space before so they know a lot of things that work for their satellites and thats a huge bone for us to remove certain risks from our development effort so zooming out from starfish。

a little bit and looking around at the rest of the industry there was a lot of excitement and investment in space starting 六七 8 years ago what are some of the things that people were excited about that have proven to be really valuable？

like theres just clear customer demand and customer dollars changing hands here and what are the set of things that turned out to be you know？

too speculative or bubbly years are used cases like that allstart off by turning the questionback on you Ben as you started to get interest in the space industry several years ago what were the things that got you interested in the space industry oh！

i mean the biggest unlock for me was when we did the space episode and realizing that the price of launch has come down 10 x i think between the initial cost per telegram to get to orbit from the early days the shuffle to the falcon nine today its literally A90 percent reduction so to me that is just this ding ding ding ding ding ding of there might be things that were noneconomic before that actually have business models around them now now i dont think im smart enough to know exactly what those things are， but that sort of makes a potential investment category light up yeah！

i think thats what in many ways we are exploring here as in industry and i think you can see today how that already is lighting up that Spacex had almost a hundredlaunches with the falcon nine last year launch rates are reaching a cadence that they havent hit worldwide since the cold war thats becauseof what Spacex is doing with the Vulcan nine and even though launch rates are hitting that cadence i have a hard time buying a launch because the waiting list is really long because there are so many people signing up to launch their satellites to space in a weird way one of the things that continues to really be an area where there is a lot of value when the space industry is launch itself， and even those Spacex is a leader there is a big need i have a big need for more rockets to be on the market and i want to see people succeeding in doing that and its a little funny to reflect on because i remember several years ago。

i would chuckle at the number of launch companies that were out there worldwide in the space industry but now i need them now i need more launch companies that so im routing for everybody i think its important to point out to all launch companies are not created equal i look at several launch providers when i was considering investing in the category and everyonegot a little bit of a different thesis， there are sort of the o Spacex is Gonna have the bigheavy thing with starship， but you really need a super super reusable first and second stage rocket thats your workhorse you know seven style that can go up and down all the time or someone else saying well its actually more energy efficient if we have a tiny little rocket and that rocket can go up and down very offend and its not a big deal if it blowes up that sort of runs counter to the the great Jeff base osism that rockets are all about economies of scale he rockets love being really big i at least felt like i was getting every pitch under the sun in terms of different rockets for different specialized usecases there were a lot of explorations on like OK well？

what are we going to do with rockets to provide unique value here？

and i think that some folks have had success with that and are continuing to grow and provide really exciting futures with rockets today？

but youre saying theres a capacity problem period like OK！

great go make the same thing is basex all by it ichuckle because sometimes it an earlystages the startup you have to have your different shader that sets your part but really if somebody else was making exactly the same thing at Spacex even if they were making exactly the same thing at Spacex just slightly worsen a couple of ways they would have a full book of business right now because we just need more rockets and we need more rockets in part because so many other things are hitting in are really exciting in the industry position， navigation and timing like gps only gets more popular communications i went goffing for the first time in a decade last week。

my golf cart had a gps yeah like i would drive closer to the whole and it would tell me how many yards to the green it was the crazy is i was like this has gps now！

its everywhere and its a stable， and even just the time in from gps allows you to synchronize things around the world on the communications front as much as we talk about Spacex does launch doesnt incredible job with launch theyre also putting up the starling constellation， which has several thousand satellites in orbit and they use that to provide internet to people around the world and there was an independent report that came out last week that projected that they would have six billion dollars in revenue in 2024 from the starling constellation from what was three or four years ago zero because it didnexist yet thats amazing growth and amazing value that people are only description the surface of yeah starling is turning out to be one of these things that a lot of people were speculating oh！

do people actually want this？

will they pay for it？

will the quality be good enough will there be enough bandwith to go around for the number of people that want it and basically the answer has just been yes it is a absolute gang busters successful business at least from everything we can tell from the outside so far and full disclosure for everyone im a small invester in space x just like im a small invester in starfish， but i dont have any privilege information on Spacex im just reading the same independent reports you are Austin and it sure seems like its going very well yeah！

yeah！

it absolutely does it theres a lot of other things are excited in the space industry earth observation is useful for a idea of different reasons earth observation data from satellites has been key over the last two years and helping you crane defend itself as it gets invaded thats incredibly powerful and saves many lives i was talking with somebody very recently， who helped develop the capability to make sos calls from your phone through a satellite from anywhere in the world they told me that they had fun recordings of some people who had been caught in wildfires and were stuck in a place that wouldnt have had cell phone service and they used the sos system on their phone to call for help and their lives were saved because help could get to them， because they could route the cellphone traffic through satellites and i was a marveling with the engineer who had helped develop the system adjust how rewarding that must feel to know like heres a voice recording of the person whos life my work saved in that instance and now were exploring a lot of new value propositions in space i think what barda has done in manufacturing some materials in space and returning them to earth is really interesting i think what interlown here in the Seattle area is doing by exploring how we can use materials from the moon to provide value here on earth is really interesting i think obvise in bias i think what were doing its starfish bases really interesting how can we protect in extend satellites on orbit？

so that we can get more value from them？

in in someday， thats the same kind of autonomy in robotics that helps us have an ever growing infrastructure in space it builds upon itself were going to see over the next five to ten years how a lot of these business models play out there is clearly a lot of economic interesting， also， the the engineer and me always has to remind myself we have to go deliver on this right we have a lot of potential there is funding that is moving into development of a lot of technologies， but we have to take the funding in the opportunities at her available and build systems that really provide value to focus and youve seen as people are able to do that so far its lead to some really successful businesses zooingback out to the industry again you touch a little bit on the defenses case there what is the size of spend in the space industry on defense vs say civilian government so comparing nasa to do in the space budgets i believe that the nasa budget and the space force budget are very similar scales that there are both tens of billions of dollars a year we talk about nasa and we highlight a lot of the things that go on at nasa and its really incredible there are a lot of really incredible things going on through the space force or otheraries of the government that also used spaces to provide value and they dont have quite the public attention， which is quite a reasonable and sometimes necessary thing， but but its also a really important thing that is being done in space we were fortunate earlier this year to be selected for something called the strat fi contracting program with the air force it is good to mean that we send a satellite to space we send an order to space in a couple of years to do missions for the space force in Geo stationary orbit it means a lot of dollars in the starfish base in a couple of different ways to go to go deliver on the potential that weve been developing the technology to be able to do and i think something thatbeen really exciting is to see the way in which the us government and maybe the space force in the air force deserves particular credit here to see the way in which they want to lead innovation forward are contract with the spacesforce， which is tensorfmillions of dollars in revenue thatstarted with a fifty thousand dollar revenue contract and there is a series of multiple contracks that we did over whats now a few years to build up the confidence for the space force to want to go forward with starfish base and to want to use our services and for us to build up our ability to deliver services for the government and so having the us government is a customer and an allied governments as a customer is is really key in the space industry is an essential part to the space industry and what is that process？

i know you have a large commercialcontract and this large stratifycontract with the government how does the process of landing a commercial customer compare with the process of a government customer over the last few years。

the government customers unique customer with uniqueset of constraints i get Davis very diplomatic of you or sometimes the government can be great customer especially when you get to work with different technology， development labs inside of the government they have been a customer that also allows us to use really advance testing facilities that they have or also provides a series of engineering perspective thats really valuable to us， but the folks that are controlling the per strings of the us government are not always the same people that are making the decisions about which companies or which technologies do we want a bad on and that means that your sales process into the government involves multiple different channels with multiple different stakeholders， and you we sell complex services that are high value for individual contracks and we work with large organizations that are dealing with complex technology and so there is no easy sales process here but at least when youselling to a commercial company， most of the people can see the email addresses of the other people that youre talking to in the organization and when youre working with large government， that is very much not true and a lot of times you have to bring stakeholders to each other to get a decision to move forward well fascinating so you hey！

you may not realize this， but i happen to know that this persons going to be a road block in the approval pathway for this id like you to get together and talk about in our product in our company in this contract because i know you know， further down the line it could be something that that comes up yeah？

absolutely！

which can be a challenge huh what advice would you have？

for other entrburners？

who are considering a government customer firstyou wanna pick when is the right time to go engage with the government customer？

if its going to be two percent of your business， then it might not be the best first customer to target you might want to stand up on the commercial side and then go support the government customer if you decide you know what either a this is a substantial portion of my business or boy my commercialbusiness up and running and now i want to go expand in the government markets one thing that different focus on the government have done very well is they have trouble so even used the term front doors into the government they designate organizations and entrypoints for you to go engage with that organization， and then that organization is tasked on the backend with connecting the dots and making sure that you reach the right customers at the end of the day a couple of programs are examples of this one is afworks， a F W E R X thats how we first started engaging with the us government is through athworks and afworks is a program that is designed to find early stage startups and help find a little bit of their development and help connect to people in the air force and the space force here is a sub part of the air force， but to help you connect with folks in the air force to move forward your your relationships of what your doing is valuable a defense innovation unit is another group that deserves to be called out， which really does a great job trying to find the latest technology and the most exciting entpartners to be able to work with and help their technology provide value to the us government and there are things that go on on like the nasa side also， nasa has a whole sbir small business innovative research program， which ideally they want to use to spring board folks into working with nasa and interproviding value to nasa so theres been a lot of effort because theres now a track record of innovative startups and technology companies providing value to the us government in a unique manner and theres a lot of people who helped earth observation companies like black sky or capella or planet begin working with the us government five ten years ago and then data from those companies is being used on a regular basis around the world to support us interests now you can look at those companies go boy， thats been a really good program to get them involved in supporting the us government lets put more resources into making sure that we get companies on the forefront into unsupporting us analyd government activities yeah make sense alright！

while were on the advice train i also want to ask you for anyone who is thinking about i was gonna ask you a hardware company， but its its broader than that its a hardware company thats bumping up against the edges of physics someone doing hard tech as i think its kind of coming to be called what advice do you have for people who are looking to build those types of companies and how that might be different than say a sass founder i think one of the things in Ben will be curious your answer here also！

youve seen us develop you probably have advice hopefully you tell me that advice rather than just put it on a podcast， but i think thats from my perspective one of the things that is challenge about a hard tech or a deep tech company is a lot of your risk can take a long time and a lot of dollars to buy down its starfish base were five years into the company we had a very successful five years and despite having a very successful five years and having a demonstration satellite in orbit right now that were learning to turn from there is still work ahead of us to have a full satellite thats providing the services that we want to provide is a business and that is just inherent to the type of business that we formed that it takes long time spans and it takes a lot of capital to four only d risk things and so you have to find ways to do risk along the journey to that endpoint you have to do things like sendup a demonstration satellite like take the hardware you developed and go down and tested it in air force lab you have to engage deeply with customers early on and those of the things that are going to tell you whether or not youre on the right path and whether its worth continue into pursue its a lot of times harder to sort through the noise and find the signal when it takes a lot to do risk things sometimes it can be easier if you build your product in three months， then you go put it on the market and you see whether or not people buy it but you can do risk things as a deep tech company and as much as you can test your ideas early and test them often it really helps you move quickly towards the endpoint that you want to be and i think thats true for startups like us i think thats also true for companies like say a spacex at his reached a later stage you see the way in which they try to fly a bunch of starships and land a bunch of starships early on many of them didnt work， but the testing that they did in trying to fly those has been huge in having them developed starship in the way that that they want to which appears to be an incredibly successful path and that same lesson like yes， it applies for Spacex at scale， but it applies at a much smaller scale for for somebody who is out on the very first day of their company they can still call a customer and say listen i dont even know totally what im going to build， but can we talk through if i were to build something in this areor if i were to build something that， did this would that be helpful for you would you want to pay for that someday yeah！

ill say for my perspective theres so many things that are different but youtouching on this interesting one， which is relationships kind of matter more because when you get an oi in the space industry or you you bring on sort of a what SaaS companies often would call a design partner i think in the space industry it really means youre taking a bad on each other whereas i think in sassland its like sure youll play with your thing and you know i might give it three to five minutes and and then right you little email telling you if i would use it or not， but it is crazy how much when you are one of only three companies in the entire sector doing something rather than you know， thirty or fifty once someone selects you as the horse that theybedding on its a really big commitment thats one big thing， the other one is the lumpiness of milestones in traditional software companies little things happen every day and you sort of barely notice and in the space industry， it seems like there are these monumental days that are trajectorychanging for companies and they happened like one to threetimes a year and your sort of holding your breath until those moments happen？

which is uh while is an investor i canimagine what its like is someone you know running a company in building a culture and leading teams and looking for that sort of consistency every day of everybody shopping up and maintaining some level of excitement the lumpiness is really unique and i have spent my whole career in the space industry and so maybe i am used to the lumpiness and dont appreciate how unique it can be but are process to get to this stratfy contract with the space force recently was really a years long process to build up to that point and it meant that the moment that we were selected for that contract was an incredible inflection point in our overall business and it was one moment where we were selected for that contract that does mean that your your business can hingj on on large individual events and you have to make sure that you build a business in a way that it is robust to theres enough potential individual events that some of them will go your way right？

right， you get me thinking now on other ones the government as a customer is pretty amazing， because its a resessionproof customer when the government says theygoodfor somemoney， like theygoodfor that money， theyre gonna do the thing， the budget is set is very different than when the world was falling apart a couple years ago i felt starfish was kind of unaffected in many ways thats true。

and i think thats true even for other areas of the space industry because even our commercial customers that are looking at buy in services right now， its because they think that in five years there is going to be a market for them and theyre not making that decision of what is is worth it five years from now based off of what the market is up or down today it is still a longterm decision where they take into account the average of expectation of the market and they us government is maybe unique resilient as a customer for me， there are aspects of economics up sordowns but in general。

many of our customers at least are very steady i think the key thing to do risk is also super different in your case you know it most b to be SaaS companies the big question is can you price and package and build something in such a way that people will pay you money for the value youproviding can you create enough value such that its worth it to go sell that to other prices or in consumer software you know its can you create something that people cant stop using like people just cant get enough of you know a social network or whatever it is and in space the key thing to do risk is can you do it can you actually make this thing the technical risk is the thing to do risk they have many engineers work at your company out of fifty people over fortier engineers crazy i mean its just a completely different set of unknowns and nd risking that you have to do i think thats true i do think for new space to be successful a factor in your engineering is the business case when we are making selections about who are key suppliers are we look back very directly at our business case and say choosing between these two components causes a difference in how much revenue were going to generate for the mission how does it affect which of these two components we select there are folks in the space industry even if you look at our world of satellite servicene？

where people have done satellite services in missions， but just didnt do so anyway that quite made sense economically for them to continue to scale and do it for lots of companies do it for lots of customers and so yes， you have to figure out can we even do this at all technologically， but thats may be hidden behind weve built an architecture that is based upon the dollars in sense and the making sure that the benefits that we provide outwayed the cost to provide those benefits and so yes， we have to see if the technology works， but we have to see if the technology works inside the architecture that makes the business work， which i think is a really good and healthy incentive structure to make sure that we have focused to make sure that we prioritize really well and i think it times where you can be ledustray with large government contractions if your organization is getting all of your cospade for in a cosplus contract and the amount of profit that you make is independent of how much effort you put in then youre not really incentifized to be efficient in the way that you operate and if youre not incentifies to be efficient in the way you operate then you wont be efficient in the way that you operate and so i think it is a really valuable thing that we and others like us have economic incentives to develop the future of spaces humans go off our planet but do so in a way that is efficient with the resources were putting in yep whatbottlenexexistforthis industry other than theres just not enough launch capacity like when you think about going from or in minds pure raw material to customers derivingvalue from objects in space what else needs more bandwidth i think so much of what were limited with is time there are a lot of things that take a longtime in our industry and one is you have to schedule your launches a longtimeout but two is there is a lot of components that we order that have twelve monthly times to ordering those components that means that like we sign a contract to launch a satellite in two years for customer two years feels like forever， but we have to go signed the contracts with our suppliers as fast as possible on the heels of that， so that they can get going on there twelve monthly time parts so that we can get them in house with a few months to assemble it into a satellite so that it can get to the launch vehicle ahead of launch and so theres a little bit of margin in case something goes wrong along the way and it took you a long time to get that contract in place because as much as the government is putting a lot of effort into moving quickly and trying to move at the speed of startups it just doesnt always yet and the other organizations yourselling to are large businesses that you can move fast but dont always inherently move fast and all of that slows you down so one of the things that i think is really exciting and helpful is that as spaceprovides value in a bunch of different facets and as the industry growth， there are more and more things that become available off the shelf or close to off the shelf that seems like it has to be essential like every component provider needs to feel like there is a deep liquid market for their stuff at all time to produce enough inventory so that you dont wait a year for them to make it for you yes and an already twelve months is fast compared to what would have happened twenty years ago when it was oh if you want to order that i could like design it and build it over the next few years， but what im excited for is five years from now when somebody is just has a production line of thresters and you pick the latest in greatest off and and maybe you have to wait a couple of months but youtalking about waiting a couple of months and im excited for customers to get used to work in with companies like cars and scale up how they work with companies out cars and im excited for the license in process to allow your satellite to get to launch to space to be moving faster and i mean like regulatory yes， yeah to make sure that the fcc is OK with satellites， which are basically just radios going into space and communicating back to earth here theres a lot of things that mean right now if you want to start launching a satellite， it usually takes at least twelve months sometimes multiples of that to get your satellite into space and thats a muchfastertimeline than it would have been and i am so excited for how fast that timeline is going to be five years in the future as more and more capabilities emerged in the space industry alright！

so time deep liquid markets of supplier manufacturers uh lets throughout the side bethetical what if we wanted the space economy to be providing five times as much value to customers and thus you know five times more revenue to space companies what else would have to happen talent？

whats what i was gonna say one of the other things that jumps right to my mind is we need more people in the space industry and i hope that focus that are listening to this take a moment to reflect on whether or not thats interesting to them at Starfish base were hiring lots of folks there are lots of companies in the space industry that are hiring a lot of people there are thousands of jobs in the Seattle area at any given time that are open in the space industry and you dont have to have been in the space industry before you could be an electrical engineer that worked on consumer products and youre going to have a really interesting unique perspective to bring into the space industry thats true from a software perspective thats true from a marketing perspective thats true from a business development perspective what we offer unique is an industry is an industry that everybodys incredibly passionate about basically everyone in the space industry got into this industry becauseitsomethingthatweve dreamed about because weve read books or watch movies or followed as Mars rovers have landed on Mars or as humans have landed on the moon and its become a dream in work into an industry where everybody is still pursuing the same dream that they had as a nine year old meansthat theres a unique connection with others in the industry and theres a unique meaning to every little accomplishment that that you get to achieve in every milestone that your company hits that can be uniquellyrewarding and i think that it means it a lot of people that come to the space industry stick in the spaceindustry but we need more people in the space industry to be able to fill the potential in the promise that we have alright my closing question for you its twenty years from now how will you know if starfish became as successful as you want it to be and what would that look like twenty years from now starfish bases doing a lot more than just life extension and satellite disposal twenty years from now the same autonomy in robotics that allows you to go up to an interact with another satellite to grab on to it to help it operate for longer that same autonomy and robotics allows you to build a space telesscope that is bigger than the jamesweb space telesscope and more robust than the games webspace telescope and you can point that telescope at another planet and decide you know what those look like comments with green things on them or thats oxygen in the atmosphere and so twenty years from now with starfish basis successful the things that we want to do then humans are in a position where we can go discover life on other planets twenty years from now humans can visit other objects in the solar system and find resources that are uncommon here on earth and use it to provide increasing value on earth whether thats rare earth， elements or helim three if youre on the moon or of variety of different resources that are unique in the solar system in and more common in other places than they are here on earth and to connect the dos youtalking about like spacedoc like if wesuccessful！

weve going to be able to have robots in space that build other space fairing things yes！

exactly and whether its build them or upgrade them or recycle them or extract resources from them thats the core capability that begins today with going up to another satellite and grabbing on to it so that you can extende its lifetime or dispose of it awesome well， awesome thank you for the time the brief dipping indusim physics anything else that you want to say here before we call it with listeners im just hopefulthat more people get drawing to the space industry i think its really an incredible industry to get to work in we have lots of potential in front of uses in industry we have a lot of passion in the industry here at starfish were starting to deliver in little bits for folks thats incredible we see the next opportunities opening up in front of us and were not uniquein that i think thats happening for companies throughout the industry and organizations throughout the industry and so im excited for what the future holds i hope that other focus are excited for what the future holds to and considering their own way getting involved awesome well listeners both in next time。