Main Engine Cut Off - T+162: Grant Bonin, SVP of Business Development at Spaceflight

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

Grant Bonin, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Spaceflight joins me to talk about everything they’ve been up to lately, including being acquired, signing deals with SpaceX for rideshares on Starlink missions and on dedicated flights to SSO, signing deals with new launch companies and international providers, and a lot more including manifesting satellites, last-mile services, and about what makes Spaceflight unique.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous—and 385 other supporters.Topicsdonate.offnominal.spaceGrant Bonin (@grantbonin) / TwitterGrant Bonin - SpaceflightWelcome to Spaceflight Grant! - SpaceflightSpaceflight Industries Signs Definitive Agreement to Sell Spaceflight, its Rideshare Launch Services Provider, to Japan’s Mitsui & Co., Ltd and Yamasa Co., Ltd. - SpaceflightSpaceflight Inc. Acquisition Finalized - SpaceflightSpaceflight to Launch Its First Rideshare Payloads on a SpaceX Starlink Mission - SpaceflightSpaceflight Inc. Signs Multi-Launch Agreement with SpaceX for Rideshare Services - SpaceflightSpaceflight Readies 28 Payloads for Inaugural Rideshare Launch on Arianespace’s Vega - SpaceflightSpaceflight Inc. Closes 2019 with Three Successful Launches in One Week Across Three Continents - SpaceflightFirefly Aerospace and Spaceflight Inc. Sign Launch Services Agreement - SpaceflightReality Rating | SpaceFundSynergy Ornithocket (@ornithocket) / TwitterThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. We've got another special guest with us today, Grant Bonin. He is the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Spaceflight. So we're going to be talking all sorts of things about Spaceflight. They've been up to a ton recently. They just got acquired. They just signed a bunch of agreements with SpaceX for rideshares on Starlink missions and dedicated flights to sun-synchronous orbit.

They've also been flying with new launch companies, international providers, doing so much that it's kind of hard to fit into a little teaser up here up front. We also talked a little bit about last mile services, which is something interesting that's happening in the industry lately. And a lot about the customer side of what people can expect working with space flight. So I want to talk with him in a second. But first, I wanted to update you on the fundraiser that Jake and I have been running or facilitating might be a better word since we are not raising the funds.

But a little while back, we talked about a fundraiser that we're doing to help out Black Girls Code and the Banneker Institute. So head over to donate.offnominal.space to read up on what we're doing there. We've raised about $7,500 so far and that's before all of the matching hits. So we've got a little bit of matching room left still.

So head over there, check that out. And again, you're donating directly to these organizations, but we have a whole matching program in partnership with a couple of anonymous listeners and Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, our good friend. So head over to donate.offnominal.space for the details on that. But for now, let's give Grant a call. Grant, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. It's a pleasure to have you here after we've sort of had this in the works for a little while now off and on. So it's good to finally have you on the show.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. when I said that you were coming on. I had a funny line in there because I previously, we met at IAC last year in DC, and we were talking about having you come on the show when you were at Rocket Lab. And at the same time, I had a potential interview lined up with somebody in your position with Spaceflight. So none of the details are right,

but we have this person at that position and you on the show. So I feel like through a variety of means, I'm accomplishing several interviews that position and you on the show. So I feel like through a variety of means, I'm accomplishing several interviews with this one right off the bat. Well, I appreciate that. Hopefully I don't combine the disadvantages of two different guests, but hopefully the advantages. No, so I do want to start there though, because you've had a really interesting look at the industry from all the different roles that you've had throughout your career so far.

Previously, you were chief engineer of space systems at Rocket Lab. We talked a good bit of ISE about what you guys are working on down there. Had Peter Beck on the show a couple times since. And then now you're over in at spaceflight in business development. And I know before either of those, you had worked more on the payload side of things. So you've you've seen the industry from payload provider side from a launch provider side, and now the sales side of things. What does that shift your perspective about each of those different wings now that you've seen them all from a different perspective? Are you learning a lot about each of these different areas of focus that you didn't really have an appreciation for previously? I think that's a great question. have an appreciation for previously? I think that's a great question. And as you say,

I've tried to intentionally cultivate a perspective on pretty much every discipline. Early advice that I got in my career when I was getting started was that if you break, I guess, the space world down by a discipline, you can look at being kind of a nuts and bolts engineer. You can look at satellite systems engineering. You can look at being kind of a nuts and bolts engineer. You can look at satellite systems engineering. You can look at propulsion side, the rocketry side, the business development, the corporate development side. If you spend, you know, you can spend a few years in any particular discipline to acquire about 80% of the knowledge associated with it. It will usually take you another 20 years to get the last 20%. And then you're stuck. Now you're a specialist and you got to be careful what you're good at, right? You got to be especially capable at what you're great at because if you become irreplaceable, you also become unpromotable. I'm stealing that line from, I think, Brad Cheatham. I want to make

sure I give him attribution. So I've been very sensitive to that and I've always been interested in kind of looking over the wall and saying, oh, what are you doing over there? So I've been very fortunate. I've had a lot of opportunity in my career initially as a satellite systems engineer working in Canada, where we built a lot of microsatellites at the Spaceflight Laboratory, and I continue to recognize their pioneering efforts in small spacecraft development. I came to Silicon Valley to be the chief engineer and later the chief technology officer of Deep Space Industries, where, among other things, we were trying to proliferate water-based propulsion systems into the market and try to create an ecosystem of customers today that could use what we consider the resource of the future in their fuel tanks.

Went over to Rocket Lab and switched. The Rocket Lab was a fantastic opportunity for me because it gave me a chance to switch over to the launch side while still doing a lot of space systems work. So I was the chief engineer of space systems there and was fortunate enough to get a chance from Peter to stand up the space systems group there,

architect a lot of the technology roadmap, and got to work on some really cool initiatives at Rocket Lab including the Capstone Lunar Mission that I'm excited to watch fly. Opportunity there was great and so and yet you're absolutely right you see from both sides but I think increasingly in every single one of those stops I found myself doing more and more strategic development and business development. And a lot of it, I've really enjoyed the times in my career where I can have one foot on the technical side and one foot on the customer side and try to make sure that things are staying matched. But as much as I've enjoyed it, it's also often been distracting. It's hard to do those two very different jobs well at the same time. So eventually, as you identified, kind of made the jump over to Spaceflight Services and was extremely excited about that, particularly because the company was

on the eve of completing its acquisition by Mitsui, which took the launch services part of that business and now lets it stand alone and pursue its own mandate in providing launch and transportation services for customers. So that's been, I was very excited about the strategic development opportunities that came with that. of all sorts of different sizes, kind of expand out of the smaller fairing and into bigger spacecraft, into rideshare offerings that could enjoy bigger economies of scale. So it was a great journey.

In terms of perspective, I think if nothing else, it tells you where a lot of the bodies are buried and what a lot of the different sausage factories look like. It's astonishing how similar and cross-cutting a lot of the themes are and a lot of the challenges are. But at the end of the day, and this is a thing that I care a lot about in a BD context, whether it's on the satellite side, it's on the launch side,

or really if it's in any aspect of tech, at least in my opinion, fundamentally it's about product-market fit. You've got to create great products, great services, great offerings for customers. It's very easy to fall in love with your own ideas, even if nobody else does. And great products are bought, not sold. So the industry is full of companies and individuals who are looking for a problem to their solution, who have fallen in love with a particular technology or a particular way of executing something for which there's no ostensible demand.

That is really the cross-cutting theme that I see is you have engineers in particular, but people in general who really fall in love with a particular widget or a particular way of executing something that is wholly divorced from solving a real-world problem. And that keeps popping up. And the challenge for NewSpace in particular has been for decades now, can you establish and create great product market fit? Can you bring something into the market that solves real problems? Can you create a thing that customers want to rip out of your hands because it's so good, because it's so compelling? Can you do real business and not have to rely entirely and continuously on government support or institutional venture financing again and again and again?

So you see these kind of problems from multiple different perspectives. But when you ask kind of what are the cross-cutting themes or lessons learned, that's the recurring theme that I see. I think I've been fortunate enough to be a part of companies that stand separately from that problem. But it's not without struggle. Does that address your question? It sure does. You are amazing. The breath that you just covered there, it brought up some things in my. So we'll talk more about that in a second. But the expansive view of the industry feels like a good fit for spaceflight because the company is trying to offer services

that require to figure out what the services that are needed by customers out there. You need to have that expansive view of the industry to make sure that you're taking note of certain trends or who's doing what or what kind of offerings that you could provide that are useful to payload providers, but also match up to what launch opportunities there are out there. So is that something that you feel like is a common theme within the company? Or maybe is that a reason that you are attracted to their mindset? I think the answer is both. you are attracted to their mindset? I think the answer is both.

Excuse me. I had been fortunate enough a couple of jobs ago to have been a customer of Spaceflight. And so I got to experience the N10 cycle of exactly what it was like to work with Spaceflight. And it was a fantastic experience. This was in the context of doing a set of spacecraft launched on their dedicated SSOA rideshare mission on a Falcon 9, which was the first of its kind. So I was very familiar with the company coming in.

And one of the things that I respected and appreciated was the breadth of knowledge and the breadth of vision. and the breadth of vision from my standpoint, you know, having worked with space flight as a customer, they're passionate about, you know, helping me get a ride into space that I might not otherwise be able to acquire or afford on a great schedule that made sense for me and in as smooth and seamless and end to end away as possible. So I came in being socialized to that. Selfishly, I came in being socialized to that.

Selfishly, I guess, the fact that Spaceflight works with a very large fraction of the industry, top to bottom, addressing many different market verticals, but then also gets a chance to work with pretty much every launch provider that is currently operating that is accessible by an American company, plus a lot of the emerging ones, and I think we'll talk about that a little bit later. It gives you a tremendous amount of insight into how different people do their job. It gives you a lot of business intelligence that's extremely interesting and useful. It gives you, I think, it lets you be prescient in a way that you might not otherwise be able to be about how different market verticals are evolving. If you work in one, I think, for example, let's take, I don't know, Earth Observation as a market vertical, for example.

If you work with one Earth Observation company, you know how they do things and you know how they see the future. And you might have a peripheral understanding of how their competitors do. When you work with almost all of them, then you start to develop a complete and I think nuanced understanding of how that market is going to evolve. And it lets you start to create predictive metrics for how a particular market might evolve. A huge passion of mine is space exploration more broadly. Having your own initiatives in that area and trying to pursue them versus seeing everybody's initiatives and how everybody is pursuing it.

And again, in a detailed way, not in a PowerPoint way, not in a press release way, really helps you form a complete picture. And fundamentally with spaceflight, the mission and vision from my standpoint is, you know, get anyone into space exactly where they want to go, exactly when they want to go, and with superior flexibility. If we get a chance to work with every launch vehicle provider, we can offer customers a ride on whatever launch vehicle makes sense in a way that no single provider can assure a given customer. So, you know, that's really what I found extremely compelling about Spaceflight in particular. You know, that's really what I found extremely compelling about spaceflight in particular. And as you said, to socialize people to spaceflight, I think I just did it, but in the opposite order of what I wanted.

You know, spaceflight considers itself to be the leading satellite launching our 272nd through 300th in the coming days as of this recording on a combination of SpaceX Starlink flight and the Vega return-to-flight mission, which are both scheduled now for almost back-to-back launches across a couple of days in this late June 2020 timeframe, that kind of access and that kind of opportunity to get people into space is fantastic. And that's what Spaceflight's been doing for years. The acquisition of the launch side by Mitsui lets us only continue to do that and hopefully accelerate by bringing new offerings into the marketplace. I guess the other thing I'd say about that, and I was just thinking about this, is that, and I've said this before, so I've recycled my own material, but you don't have to rewind very far into the past to see a time when our future in space depended on the decisions

of three countries and a couple of billionaires. What I've always been passionate about, and one of the reasons I started with small spacecraft, is I was excited by a future with a larger number of lower-cost missions. But more broadly, I wanted to see us create a space program for the rest of us. And I loved working with small satellites because you could get customers a mission done cheaply and quickly. I loved working with small satellites because you could get customers a mission done cheaply and quickly. I loved working with small launch because you could be responsive and you could do dedicated Uber and Lyft type delivery for small satellite customers. With spaceflight, we can do that for everybody.

We can get anybody up as close to as practical when they want to go where they want to go. And we're going to expand our service offerings as well to complete and round out that picture. Yeah, I want to get into all the specifics of the market itself and manifesting them on, you know, various launch vehicles, as you've said, but let's just close the loop on the acquisition a little bit. This acquisition was closed recently. It was in the works for a couple of months, it sounds like. I'm curious about how it's going to affect the company. You mentioned that it's going to let the launch side focus on the launch side more. And I think that's a reference to there being these two halves of Spaceflight, which is Black Sky and Spaceflight Inc., which manifests payloads on different rides. So what is the interaction there between the two parts of the company? And the acquisition is just of that launch manifesting side of things. So what kind of effects would we see out of that? And how does it change the interaction at all between the two wings of spaceflight industries?

Yeah, I think that, so as you say, the launch services side, spaceflight, for whom I work, now kind of stand apart as our own separate entity, separate from Black Sky, which is developing an Earth observation constellation. Really, I think for a long time, they were complementary. And we continue to work with Black Sky to this day to provide them with launch services. But really what this acquisition does is lets each business unit or each company stand alone, stand apart, and double down and focus on its own vision for the future. Black Sky is pursuing, and I don't want to, I'm not a particularly great spokesperson for them, so forgive me if any of this is inaccurate, but fundamentally BlackSky is developing a great constellation of multispectral Earth observation spacecraft. That is the business that they're focusing on and all of the services that come with that. You can imagine that that's very, very different from trying to provide commercial launch services for a number of customers. So they're very different kinds of businesses that require different strategies and benefit from the highest level of focus practical. So a different way of saying that is that while the relationship between the companies remains strong

and we continue to do business together, this was the win-win scenario. And what the acquisition allows us to do really is, as I kind of alluded to, it really lets us take the next step in our own strategic planning because our offerings have started with satellite rideshare and doing a lot of the mission management and engineering services in support of that. But we've got our own ambitions for what the next five to 10 years and beyond look like. And they're very tightly aligned with Mitsui's ambitions as well, which is one of the major selling points for me in making this transition. In terms of implications for the company, from my standpoint, it really just gives us a mandate to go out and pursue our vision at full speed. and pursue our vision at full speed without having the cross-coupled challenges

of two different companies that need to do two different things to keep their businesses running. Does that make sense? It absolutely does, yeah. And now that BlackSky is kind of a customer of Spaceflight, maybe they always have been in everyone's mind, but you've got this rideshare coming out

in a couple of days here. It's interesting to use that as an example, because even with a company as integrated, I assume they went through many of the same flows as a typical spaceflight customer does. Or was it more opportunistic than that, because these Starlink rideshares weren't announced that long ago, and here we are, Black Sky's got two on the next flight here.

So how does that come about, and was we are, Black Sky's got two on the next flight here. So how does that come about? And was it always a collaboration tightly between the two companies? Or was this an organic Black Sky approaching space flight and saying, we need a ride? Well, we've got agreements with Black Sky that both predated me

in joining the company for launch services, but then also will continue to extend into the future. And again, that's to mutual benefit because I think, I hope that BlackSky and our other customers recognize that, you know, we can work with more vehicles and have experience manifesting people and integrating people to more launch vehicles than any other service provider. In terms of how that comes about, I mean, sometimes these deals are done years in advance for a particular launch. Sometimes they're done under the structure

of a master launch services agreement and we'll move a customer vehicle to vehicle until both the customer is ready and we've identified the launch capacity that gets them exactly to the operating orbit that they want to go. The Starlink opportunities are fantastic, and we're going to continue to be the beneficiary of that, as well as SpaceX's other small satellite launch opportunities. The Starlink

orbits can be low, and there's varied demand for mid-inclination. So often it requires a customer to have their own propulsion solutions to boost their spacecraft from a relatively low altitude into their intended operating orbit. The black sky ones are particularly, I guess, make me very happy because way back in my deep space industry days, we developed the water-based propulsion that's used in black sky satellites. So I have a high degree of confidence in those spacecraft being able to bring their orbits up to a stable circle for you oh yeah it's i've created my own self-licking ice cream cone i guess um the uh but no the the the um the starlink opportunities are going to be great for black sky and they're great for customers that want mid-inclination and have the propulsive capability to achieve um a longer-term operating orbit.

That's also something that spaceflight will increasingly be talking about, is our ability to help with those last-mile transportation solutions if they're required. Really being able to, if a customer doesn't have the propulsive capability to achieve the final station that they want to operate from, that's something we can help with as well.

So when I talk about us doing space transportation, from my standpoint, it's not just about launch. And increasingly, we're going to be talking in the coming months about exactly what we mean there and exactly what the offerings are going to be. But as much as we continue to work with every launch provider to get a customer exactly where they want, we'll continue to bring in a variety of options for in-space transportation as well so we can mix and match to get a customer

exactly where they want to go. But yeah, so circling all the way back I guess, with Blacksky we've got the sort of long-term agreement that we're starting to do increasingly for customers. I'm happy to talk about that a little bit more, but really what it whittles down to are these essentially true service agreements where a customer can come to us and enter into a contract that's almost like a subscription service for launch. The way that launches are booked when you go directly to a provider or the way that often launches were booked by us in the past can be extremely cashflow intensive. For customers who want to launch a very large number of spacecraft, but they don't always know exactly when or to where,

a subscription model starts to make a lot of sense. Now, maybe you have roaming fees if you need to move to a niche vehicle or a very specific launch opportunity. But broadly, in an industry where cash and cash flow are king, we really want to increasingly move to these bigger agreements with Constellation customers, where they get, quote unquote, you know, one low monthly payment smoothed over an entire period of the contract's performance. And we just take care of launch for them in whatever way makes the most sense when it makes sense to lock it in. So is that a situation where, and this goes for, I guess, standard non-subscription customers as well,

are they paying Spaceflight directly and then Spaceflight is finding the best launch and paying the launch providers? Or is it something that they're paying Spaceflight for a service, kind of like a travel agent, but you're still going to end up paying the airline for your airplane ticket. They're just finding the right match for you. How does that relationship work out on what is kind of a triad of companies? Yeah, I think the short answer is it varies, but that's not a very fun answer. It would be a very boring short podcast. Any questions? No, I will not be taking follow-up questions. No, the truth is that it varies, though. But what we really do is we try to bundle the launch service side of it with the mission management and engineering services as well.

When a customer, and I think a lot of people have found this, when a customer goes directly to a launch vehicle provider, they might be able to realize a great price per kilogram. But the price isn't always the price. But the price isn't always the price. It typically does not include a very large number of things that have to happen in logistics, in engineering and integration services, and broadly in mission management that get the customer out of their loading dock and onto a rocket. And so while the launch vehicle pricing can be enticing for customers and prompt them to want to go directly to a launch vehicle provider, they quickly realize that the cost isn't the cost or that the price isn't the price. So we try to bundle that as one all-inclusive package where you come in, you basically, you either purchase a launch on a onesie-twosie basis from us, or you purchase broader launch services, and we take care of

everything for you. And that includes supporting regulatory side of things, that includes the integration services that I alluded to before. And we really just try to make it as smooth and seamless for customers as possible. The other thing that I think can be missed, but is important, is that oftentimes when a customer engages a particular launch vehicle provider for a flight, if that launch vehicle provider has to be delayed or even shut down because of a business or technical failure, that customer can be, I'm trying to think of a non-profane way to say this. It just might be out of luck. Whereas what we kind of try to do is provide an intrinsic insulation

against the otherwise brittle nature of a point-to-point contract. If we've manifested you on one particular launch, but either its primary is delayed or the launch vehicle provider itself is delayed, we can move you off that launch to an earlier one in whatever way makes business sense for you and in a way that decouples you from the success or failure of that one single launch vehicle provider you might otherwise want to home run your business

to. So there's a premium associated with that flexibility, but we think the value of that flexibility well outweighs the premium. And those are the kind of, I guess those are the kind of structures that we put in place, the kind of deals that we do. You mentioned that, you know, that you could go to any launch provider and get a better deal per kilogram or whatever, but that it's not an all-inclusive look at what your mission is. Is that, does that feel similarly, I don't want to say mismatched directly, but do you think that having been on the launch side previously, that launch companies might not have the right organizational setup to deal with the needs of sometimes very small customers when they're dealing with maybe a dedicated ride share or even secondary payload kind of stuff? To me, it feels from the outside that

there are launch companies that have a lot of other things on their mind. They have a lot to worry about when they are conducting a launch, and they might not be the right organization for customers. But I'm curious if, having been on both sides, you feel like that, or maybe this is me missing something from the launch vehicle side themselves. Oh, no, I think it's a good observation. It varies. I don't think that I can make a generalization across all launch vehicle providers. But some spacecraft are easier to integrate than others. And it is absolutely going to be the case that there will be missions where it makes a lot of sense for a spacecraft developer to work directly with the launch vehicle provider. Because perhaps they really may they might have they might have a number of requirements that make them want to really simplify that customer journey.

On the flip side, if you've got oftentimes a very small spacecraft, but oftentimes as well, a very exotic spacecraft in form factor, a launch vehicle provider won't know what to do with that. They don't want to touch that. They don't want to deal with, so there's a difference between buying a port on a launch vehicle versus trying to figure out the subport integration if you're too small for that port. Those are areas where we consider ourselves to be specialists. Those are the least flashy,

but I think some of the most important things we do on the backend is support integration to any launch vehicle that's currently flying. We've worked with all of them except, well not all of them, we work with Long March, but we work with every launch vehicle provider that we can manifest on as an American company. And we know where, we know a lot of the hard-learned lessons, whereas the, I think a lot of the customers that, especially first-time customers, might not be fully aware of that longer-term journey and some of the challenges they're going to hit. And some of the, quote-unquote, equitable adjustments, they might see that their contracts, the corresponding integration challenges downstream. So we really do try to make sure that the price is the price.

But circling back to the first comment you made, and I think this is, I applaud how great Rocket Lab is at completing the customer journey. It's one of the things that I thought was exceptionally well done when I was there. And so if you're in a payload class and you have specific mission needs that make sense, a lot of the, it makes sense to go directly to a provider like Rocket Lab. You'll pay a premium for the white glove service, but I still pay a premium to take an Uber somewhere instead of a train. That can make a lot of sense. And if you're in that payload class, if you're in that smaller size class. But I think Peter Beck would be one of the first people to point out that a lot of emerging launch vehicle providers don't even think about the customer journey. They're trying to think about getting a vehicle flying. But the delta in how you have to construct a successful launch company

or the challenges of creating a successful launch company don't end after your first successful flight. Because a lot of the time, not only have you not developed the infrastructure or the service, the end-to-end service to get a customer, again, from their loading dock to your rocket, but you probably also haven't thought through the production side of things. The joke that I think Pete made, I don't want to attribute this to him falsely, so I'll have that caveat in there, but building that second or third rocket

is a lot harder than building that first successful rocket. Switching gears from R&D to production is very hard, and I believe, unfortunately, there will be a lot of shipwrecks on that shore, but at the same time, we think that we're optimistic about the success of some of these emerging smaller launch vehicle providers in the bigger size classes that can arguably enjoy a somewhat larger total addressable market. And as I think you and I talked about just prior to the podcast, we try to make sure that we work with all of them so that they're part of our portfolio of

vehicles. Yeah, and that's a thing I want to get into a little bit here. There are so many launch vehicles in development today, as you're talking about there. But there's also, you know, things like that Falcon 9 rideshare announcement that came at SmallSat last year. So even existing launch providers are changing up what they offer. And I'm curious what it's like for a customer that might be signed up with Spaceflight to be shifting around between vehicles. Is that something they have a lot of visibility in? Is it something they're driving? between vehicles? Is that something they have a lot of visibility in? Is it something they're driving? And what is the onboarding, if you will, for getting one of these new launch launchers that might be attractive to some customers into the spaceflight system? So it can. So okay, so I guess starting with starting with, I guess, the customer experience, what we try to do is we do try to give

customers the maximum amount of transparency, and the simplest process for changing. Because there is such a significant disparity between the pricing of different launch vehicles, we have to make sure that we're being responsible for our business and how we price that out. But again, we always hope that we try to design these things such that the value outstrips the premium that customers might pay. I think that we're able to offer more flexibility and more transparency than ever before. Some of that is really facilitated by what SpaceX has brought into the market. And as some of your listeners may be aware, Spaceflight considers the SpaceX offerings in particular to be highly complimentary for reasons I think I just mentioned.

We can do a lot of the intent mission management integration services that support getting a customer onto SpaceX launches if the particular orbits they're going to make sense. And SpaceX realizes the best price per kilogram in the market themselves.

So see that as highly complimentary and it's why we're excited to have entered into a long-term launch agreement with SpaceX for rideshare services that, yeah, secures our capacity, lets us deliver the end-to-end mission management, and lowers costs for upcoming rideshare launches. We're pretty excited about that. But then if there's a customer who needs to go up in between

when those opportunities exist, or to an orbit that is not facilitated by those opportunities, we try to expose the full manifest of our launch capacity to our customers as frequently as we can. I think we're getting better at that. We intend to only get better at that. We really just want to update the menu as much as we can. And if a customer comes to us and says, well, I want to move to this different launch vehicle because I'm not going to get the orbit that I wanted. And we try to socialize customers to the fact that launch almost always, well, it does always in small satellite world move to the right. Commissioned a great study by Bryce to look at that. Launch delays are a part of life. So when a customer comes and says, this launch delay is prohibitive to us,

or this isn't going to work, we try to make sure they know exactly what the menu of their options look like. And we also have initiatives that are going to try to hopefully allow us to do that faster than has been contemplated before. It can still take several months to make those kind of switches. There's a lot of paperwork associated with it. There's a lot of logistics. We're trying as hard as we can and and I think successfully, to really reduce the lead time associated with switching to a different vehicle as well. Part of that is making sure that we've secured the capacity in advance. Part of that is making sure that we're set up to execute that at a moment's notice, that we're ready for it.

And a big part of that is just working with the customer upfront to ensure adequate planning for those kinds of switches. So we try to make it as seamless as possible. I think it's only going to get better, if for no other reason than the large variety of vehicles in our overall portfolio. There are way too many launch vehicles to count that are trying to come online in the next couple of years. I learn about a new one, I swear, every day. I think that's accurate. Yeah. So on that note, though, are there particular criteria or things that launch vehicles need to meet in order for spaceflight to consider them? Or is the criteria, are you building a rocket that's actually going to launch? Is that the one criteria or is there more to it than that? I think it's a spectrum. It's a risk-price trade-off. For a launch vehicle provider that

is early, but regarding whom we have some optimism, if we're going to take the risk to secure that capacity, the price needs to be commensurate with that. And that gives us a lot of opportunity, right? Because we can get in with emerging launch vehicle providers early, purchase capacity at low cost wholesale. And if they're successful, be able to retail it out later. But upfront, we've managed down that price in a way that manages our own risk profile. So that can be a win-win scenario for launch vehicle providers that are trying to get early traction in the market.

We can be an early customer, but the price has to be aligned with the risk posture because the bottom line is that, as unfortunate as it is, a very large number of emerging launch vehicle providers are going to fail. There is, I think, there's a fund called Space Fund that has a great index or listing of all the different launch vehicle providers that have been proposed, and I think they're tracking something like 140

And it's available on their website space fund calm and I think they have to update it like I'm saying every week So so there are a whole bunch of launch vehicle providers But I think it's also easy to separate the credible ones from the incredible ones But we try to get them early because that's when the pricing is most advantageous to us. We have some customers that are willing to take the risk and be manifested on the first maiden flight of a new vehicle. We have other customers who you might imagine, especially in aerospace, are wholly risk averse. They won't want to touch early capacity or maiden flights with a 10-foot pole. And then everything in between. And it's often that cost-risk tradeoff. So it seems like the recurring answer I have for you is it depends, but it really depends.

But we do try to at least evaluate them all. And as soon as we think we can responsibly secure capacity, we usually do, to, I think, the net benefit of our customers. For something like the—and I know we're running low on time, so let me know when you've got to get out of here, but one of the things that I'm curious about on this SpaceX agreement, and I don't know if this is something that we can talk about even, but when you say it's a multi-launch agreement

and you've secured long-term manifests with them, is that that you have purchased a certain amount of each of those launches, or is it more that you've signed some sort of agreement that you're going to be basically marketing these slots that are available, but anything you don't sell is SpaceX's to sell? Oh, yeah, it's a mixed bag in this case. We do expect that we'll continue to go out. It depends. We think, as we've done before, we'll continue to go out and when it makes sense, purchase an entire vehicle.

But with SpaceX, it's really about making sure that we've secured the seats, that we've secured the slots, that we've secured ports. That deal right now runs through the end of 2021. It secures a certain amount of capacity for us and the ability to increase that capacity. But yeah, in the context of this SpaceX arrangement, it's securing the slots. We're not buying those whole vehicles. So the small satellite rideshare missions are also complemented, of course, by the Starlink

launch opportunities, which we hope to continue to take advantage of as well. Yeah, that wasn't in the announcement of the agreement. Is that a separate thing in its own right? Because the announcement just had sun synchronous orbits. I mean, we're going to continue to manifest on the Starlight missions and all of that's part of our broader working relationship with SpaceX. Awesome.

It's unfortunate there's not so many of those flights to manifest space on, you know, it's really infrequent these days. I like how you were trying to figure out where i was going i was like what it's a launch every third day it's it's it's i mean like we have to you have to take a step back and uh you know it's really funny i you can imagine this i think we talked about this at ic at core i am, I am a fanboy. And I remember I was sitting at a lunch meeting when that first Falcon Heavy flight went off, and they landed those two boosters side by side. And we were just sitting around the table, and we were just blown away. We're like, oh my god, that's so cool. Let's have a beer and celebrate that what was that that was like three years ago or something uh time flies but i think you have to recognize how extraordinary spacex has

been um in heaving into this market completely disrupting it uh owning launch exciting people and it's um it's just frankly it's it's a privilege to be partnered with such a visionary company that's managed to um really succeed on pretty much everything that it's put its mind to. So it's really, when we completed that deal, and when we get customers on any launch vehicle, we're excited. But if we're talking about SpaceX, it's really hard not to be fanboy mode. So it's a real privilege for us to work with them and hopefully complement their offerings. Yeah, it does seem even even from the outside, complimentary because the timeline here of SSOA flew, as we talked about. That was a spaceflight mission that was manifested by you

on a Falcon 9. And then SpaceX had STP-2, which was one of the Falcon Heavy flights in which they manifested way too many payloads. And I don't know if it's any indication that maybe they've had enough of that, but now they're back with a long-term agreement with space flight. So I feel like it's a natural pairing that sets up really nicely for both companies. So it's cool to see that continuing. And I'm excited to watch all these new launch vehicles fly and have so much capacity. I think the only thing is that everybody listening out there needs to keep building payloads for it. I know that only thing is that everybody listening out there needs to keep building payloads for it. I know that's one thing that's always scary to people building

small launch solutions out there. It's that we got to have stuff to launch. Well, I think that that's a really interesting observation. And I think it's, I don't, I wouldn't want to be controversial to the detriment of my business. But with that said, here are my hot takes with that disclaimer having been offered. But it's interesting because I think that people expected the current price of launch to be entering a regime of elasticity, and it hasn't and i think i think this was observed by by tory bruno ula um you know even with the falling cost of launch um spacecraft development costs have not fallen in a commensurate way and even when we talk about the mega constellations that are in development um you know people talk about mass production nothing in aerospace happens in truly mass production

your best case scenario is high volume production, arguably even for the megaconstellations. So you see a lot of, when you see, I think, launch companies that have a business plan predicated on a megaconstellation, that can always be a reason to be skeptical. The failure of one web to materialize felt like a harbinger and made people wonder if we were having a flashback to the earlier part of the century with mega constellations kind of going pop.

It can be brittle to base your business on a mega constellation and it becomes really tricky because I think SpaceX has shown this is how you do it, not what that challenge challenges with Starlink. But if you're a small launch vehicle provider that wants to hinge your business on the mega constellation, but you can only fly two or three of a mega constellation spacecraft at once, that becomes intrinsically rate limiting.

And then two, if that particular constellation customer fails to materialize, it can topple the broader business of the launch vehicle provider. So it's all, you don't want to create the house of cards. But you do see, I think, a number of houses where you're skeptical about under the wallpaper, is it all cards? And so again, this speaks to, in my opinion anyway, the importance of having the maximum diversity of launch options possible.

So that if we do deal with Constellation customers, they don't want to be tied to a single launch vehicle. They're afraid of the business failure or the technical failure of a single launch vehicle. And then we also want to diversify the launch vehicle side because we do work with some service providers that have gone all in on a Constellation customer. And that can be dangerous. So it's going to be super interesting to see this evolve. I would love to claim more prescience about the evolution of the industry than I've had. But it's guesswork. Who's going to succeed from my standpoint?

Who isn't? It's the Wild West. And one day, all of a sudden, there can be a global pandemic that completely shatters the operation of half the industry. So you never know what's going to come out of left field at you. So we try to build flexibility as a key value into everything we do. We're running low on time, so it feels like a good place to end it. I'm sorry we're not going to be able to get to Ornithocket today.

I know you've had a lot of announcements on that side of your life as well. So maybe we'll have to have you back for that sometime soon. Well, for the listeners who aren't familiar with that, you know, I decided to... Should have never given you this opportunity. Throw my hat in the ring with others and develop an alternative launch solution. I think by any meaningful metric, it outstrips any other launch vehicle provider in performance. Certainly in terms of revenue compared to initial investment, it's succeeding.

And it's also built to be intrinsically immune to the current crises we face in the pandemic and also fluctuations in the marketplace. So that's at Ornithocket. I don't manage the Twitter account for that. And I don't really do this anymore. It was a joke that took off. And the number of people, by the way, who called me and said, hey, is this for real? And would particularly depress some of your listeners. But to the extent that advertising that capability too widely is intrinsically career limiting, I think you're right. It is a good time to call it quits. Well, Grant, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more in the future as some of these things start to happen. So thanks again. And I hope you are holding up

out there. I know you've been dealing with the pandemic just like all of us. So hope it's going well. Yeah, we're healthy and safe. And as long as that's true, everything else is negotiable. Awesome. Thanks, Grant. No, thank you. This was fun. Thanks again to Grant for coming on the show. It is always a pleasure talking with him. He is a wonderful human to spend some time with. So I hope you get a better sense of what spaceflight offers and the way that it fits in the market. And there's obviously a lot of trends that are happening in the market right now. So it's an interesting cross section of a lot of the things we talk about here on the show every single week. But I could not do these kind of things without your support. There are 423 of you supporting the show every single month. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com

slash support if you want to join the crew over there. And that includes 38 executive producers who produced this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. As always, it means a lot. It helps keep this thing going and keeps people like Grant coming on the show. So thank you. Got any questions or comments uh send them to me anthony at main engine cutoff.com or on twitter at we have miko once again thanks for listening Bye.