Main Engine Cut Off - T+198: Ryan McDevitt, CEO of Benchmark Space Systems

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Ryan McDevitt, CEO of Benchmark Space Systems joins me to talk all about what Benchmark has been up to lately, what mobility-as-a-service means for the industry, and their partnership with Orbit Fab.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 executive producers—Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous—and 683 other supporters.TopicsBenchmark Space SystemsBenchmark Space Systems unveils in-space mobility-as-a-service business - SpaceNewsSatellite propulsion startup Benchmark eyes growth in military market - SpaceNewsOrbit FabOrbit Fab and Benchmark Space Systems to partner on in-space refueling technologies - SpaceNewsOrbit Fab to launch propellant tanker to fuel satellites in geostationary orbit - SpaceNewsThe 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 JustusArtwork photo by SpaceX

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got a guest with us today. We have Ryan McDevitt who is the CEO of Benchmark Space Systems. They are a company building propulsion systems. They've also come up with a couple new business model ideas for what propulsion companies can offer to their customers. And interestingly, they've been partnering with a company called OrbitFab, who is going to be building fuel depots in space, actually have launched their first one. And Benchmark is going to be putting one of their refueling ports on every one of their thrusters for future customers to be able to refuel, leaning into the idea that this will be a ubiquitous service one day. So I'm really excited to talk to Ryan about all of that and pick his brain on some things that I've had on my list

for a while about Benchmark and their partnership with OrbitFab in particular. But before we give him a call, I want to say thank you to everyone out there who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 724 of you supporting the show every single month, and that includes 41 executive producers who produced this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks to Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everett Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this

show possible. And if you want to join that crew of supporters and also get an entire other podcast I do called Miko Headlines in your feed every single week, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support, sign up at the $3 a month or more level, and you'll get a show every weekend where I run through all the stories of the week, give you some thoughts on them, and keep you up to date on the news. So it's a great way to stay up to date and support the show. And once again, thank you all so much. And without further ado, let's give Ryan a call. Ryan, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. It's a pleasure to have you here today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

We have had a very long asynchronous email chain to try to get you on the show. It's been a busy little while for you. Can you just give us an update on the last couple months and what Benchmark's been up to? Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's been crazy for sure. So this year has been a big one for us. First flight hardware in space, supporting customer missions. So getting those up, helping to support those customers, getting to test that out. And while we're doing that, the team is also hard at work on the next missions, next hardware that's going up end of this year into 2022. So lots of stuff going on. That's always good to have hardware in process flying soon to be flying. That's a fun place to be for so many companies that are not doing a lot with hardware

at the moment. That's like, I'm sure that feels good for you. Yeah, it's and it's such a great transition. It's a great culmination of all the stuff that comes before it all the years of R&D, you know, kind of bringing on the team, getting that all there. It's also obviously only the very first step in a much longer process. So it's both something to celebrate and also a reminder, okay, the real race starts now. I'd love to hear about some of the background that you mentioned there. Can you give us a little pitch on where things have been, where it started with Benchmark and bring us up to date on the storyline today? with Benchmark and bring us up to date on the storyline today?

Yeah, absolutely. So Benchmark got started in 2017 to commercialize my PhD research. So I was a PhD student at the University of Vermont, working on a NASA funded project to develop small satellite propulsion. Specifically, we were focused on ways to build chemical propulsion that was less expensive, faster to build, used non-toxic or green propellants. And so when I started in 2009, not really a big market for it. It was really a NASA thing. Maybe there'd be something someday. But in that timeframe between 2009 and when I graduated in 2014, you start to see companies popping up that are using CubeSats and SmallSats as the backbone of their business model. And so we were able to kind of take that. It took a few years, percolated on a little bit,

and then in 2017, started the company proper. So that's how we got going. Fast forward a few years to 2020, and pretty transformational moment in the company's history. We acquired a company out of California called Tesseract Space. They were working on small satellite propulsion as well, had some great technology. Benchmark was focused on the smallest end of the market. Tesseract was focused on the medium and large size of the market, but both same vision from their founders and what we were working on. How can we make this better for the ecosystem? How can we use non-toxic propellants? We were able to combine those two technologies and those two companies,

really bring everything together. And that's what helped us get our first flight hardware into space only six months after, sorry, we shipped the hardware only six months after the companies came together. So that's kind of where we've been. Today, we're about 35 full-time employees, both out in California and here in Vermont, where the headquarters are. And we're heading towards 50, 55 over the next year. That's a decent size. That's crazy. Yeah. You mentioned green propellants, which has been a topic, like you said, a very popular topic in the last couple of years. I feel like the lifespan of the show that I've done, it's been a topic with various weirdly named green propellants out there. You know, there's like AFM 315 or something like that. There's a lot of these new ones that are coming about. I'd love to

hear your take on all the different varieties of hydrazine alternatives. You know, the main thing that you hear is that they're easier to work with, they are the constraints around loading them and shipping them as is much less. But I'd love to hear from you what you chose, why you chose that over the other options, and, you know, how everything trades out there. Yeah, absolutely. So we talked about this when we talk with investors or customers that maybe aren't as educated on the topic. We use the word green, because that's kind of what the industry uses. But when we talk about it, the focus isn't on environmentally friendly, like you might think about on earth. Although that's often true. Really, what we're talking

about is easier to handle non toxic. And that translates to the customer for lower total cost of ownership. The propellant should be less expensive, it's easier to handle. So you don't need as much infrastructure to handle it. The materials that you're working with in terms of building the hardware should be less expensive, all of that. So that's kind of the core tenets of what we were looking at and why we selected at Benchmark and the team at Tesseract, why they'd selected to work with green propellants. Now, specifically, the two companies, and now together going forward, we use hydrogen

peroxide, high test peroxide, HTP as kind of the core infrastructure there. Screen propellant, you know, breaks down into water and oxygen, safe to handle using appropriate safety precautions, rubber gloves, eye protection, et cetera. The big thing for us there is it's a high-performing propellant that can be synthesized from water, which means if you look to the future in situ resource utilization, asteroid mining, lunar mining, et cetera, you can make HDP out of water. And that gives us kind of an infrastructure for the future, right? So we're doing what makes sense. Now we're building products that are performance competitive with anything on the market using HTTP. But we also see this as kind of the long tail here is being able to mine

it in other places. So how does that compare to some of the more exotically named and maybe exotically sourced alternatives that are out there? They've been, you know, there's a couple of flight tests recently flying some different varieties. So what's the, what's the main thing that we should take away as the differences between them all? Yeah. So, you know, the big things, the big two on the market that people talk about LMP-103S, which comes out of Europe, um, and then AFM-315E, which has been renamed to Ascent. So you'll see Ascent based thrusters. Better name. Yeah. Right. A little bit easier. It rolls off the tongue a little easier. So GPIM, Green Propellant Infusion Mission, Ball Aerospace, with Aerojet Rocketdyne tested the Ascent last year and successful test. I guess what I would say when we look at it, and

I will detour here to say that we work with Ascent. We're on an Air Force funded project to kind of study Ascent and see how it works with our thrusters. We do see it as being a very interesting propellant. It's very high performance. It's a monopropellant. So it's a little bit easier to work with in that sense. It is challenging to work with. And I think everyone in the industry who's familiar would agree with that. It has a very high flame temperature, has a very high ignition temperature.

So it drives a lot of your design choices. It's not appropriate for every mission. It's expensive. The propellant itself is expensive, but it's also expensive to work with. So it really will come down to for specific missions where performance is probably the, you know, is the top criteria. You might want to be in a position where LMP 103 S or Ascent are kind of driving you in that direction. What we have, and what we really focus on is that sweet spot of performance per dollar, you know, performance per kilogram. And that's the products that we're building are kind of unmatched in that specific area. And fortunately, that's a pretty meaty

chunk of the market is interested in that. In terms of some of the technical aspects here, I feel like people that have heard the word peroxide probably have heard the word decomposition nearby. And I'm curious what constraints that puts on your designs, how you manage that on any given mission. Maybe you can explain a little bit more for people that haven't heard those two words close together. Yeah, absolutely. So hydrogen peroxide, one of the challenges with it is that it does spontaneously decompose. And so if you've ever had a bottle that you bought at the grocery store of 3% peroxide, and you go to use it two years later to clean a cut, and it doesn't do anything.

That's because it's continuously decomposing. It goes flat like a bad Coke. Exactly, exactly. And it's always flat when you need it most, right? And so with high test peroxide, so generally speaking, 85% or above, we use 90% as our primary. There are a couple things to note. So one, it decomposes slower at higher concentrations. So it's a little more stable at higher concentrations

that benefits us with the stuff that we're doing. The second thing I would call out here is a lot of the data and a lot of the experience that the aerospace industry has around hydrogen peroxide comes from the 50s and 60s. And we've actually developed for other applications, primarily for silicon manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing, better peroxide that's cleaner, has fewer additives, and breaks down slower. So we have demonstrated in our facility, and our supplier has demonstrated at their facility, decomposition rates that are

orders of magnitude lower than what you would find published in the literature on aerospace grade from the 50s and 60s. And then the third thing I would say is it really just takes a mindset of designing your spacecraft to be prepared for some level of decomposition and taking advantage of that. So we use that decomposition, it's creating oxygen, which helps to pressurize our system. So we actually need to carry less pressure in because we know that that's going to be there. So it's kind of like leaning and taking a weakness and leaning into it a little bit and saying, no, actually, we can turn this into a strength where we can be more volume or mass competitive. So those are the things that

we think about, and we've been able to demonstrate. And when we can tell that story to customers, they get excited about it. And it's why we've been selected for some of the missions we're on. So is that the main limitation on the on orbit life of your systems? Or are there other components that, you know, might limit how long something can be operational? I think like most companies, we design our systems to kind of last exactly as long as they need to, plus a little bit of margin. You know, I think maybe we'll get a chance to talk about refueling later in the conversation. So that will change the dynamics a little bit. But right now, you know, we go up, we have a certain amount of propellant

on board. And so all of the rest of our system is designed to make sure that all that propellant gets used appropriately. Probably the place that would be the most fragile besides the propellant is the catalyst bed for the thrusters. Those can be designed to have very long lifetimes, but you're carrying catalysts that you don't need. So you kind of right size it. You're scaling that with what the actual mission is. Exactly. So what is that general timeframe for some of the stuff that is on your plate at the moment? Yeah, it goes all the way from, you know, kind of a thousand seconds of throughput. So, you know, in practice, the customers are using these to do sometimes small maneuvers, right? They're only firing for five or 10 seconds at a time.

Other missions might require, you know require 10 minutes of continuous burn. So the total lifetime could be years of how long they're going to be using this thing. But in terms of throughput, it's anywhere from 1,000 seconds up to 20,000 seconds on a thruster. And there are exotic deep space missions that we're kind of working with customers on

where they're going to want 50,000 plus seconds per thruster. So it could be a very long lifetime. Yeah, I'd love to hear about some of the missions that you are working on now. I think the partnership you had with Spaceflight, that is now up there, right? That is, I'm currently, or is that the one coming up pretty soon? That's the one coming up. Okay. I'm getting my Spaceflight. They're flying too many things. I'm getting them all mixed up. So much, right?

So let's hear about that one because that's something we've had a couple of people from space flight on recently. So I feel like this is a good bookend to that conversation with them. Yeah. So early stages, I can't say too, too much other than we're supporting by building the propulsion system for their LTC line of their Sherpa space vehicle, their orbital transfer vehicle. And so we'll be supplying those. There's been some press. They've got one coming up soon.

And we're not quite ready to break the press release here. So I'll let them kind of talk more about that. But that's going up in the near future. We'll be supporting with that orbital transfer vehicle, chemical propulsion system. There are a couple more coming down the pipeline that we'll be supporting with that orbital transfer vehicle, chemical propulsion system. There are a couple more coming down the pipeline that we'll be supporting there as well. So it's mostly Earth orbit missions for now, but it sounds like longer term, you're looking towards moon and Mars, that kind of stuff? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's something, you know, we're working with customers

on propulsion systems that are intended for the moon. I can't say who yet, but we will have stuff going around the moon. We can draw some squiggly lines. I'm just saying that... There's a lot of stuff going to the moon these days. There's a lot of stuff going to the moon, right? Exactly. And so, yeah, we're excited about that, taking the technology that we have and applying it for a really exciting mission, which is, you know, the team is so excited about that.

That's why you get into this, right? I mean, low earth orbit is fun, and there's a lot of money to be made there. But when you get to tell someone, you know, hey, come join us, and we're going to go to the moon together. It's just a whole different. It's pretty motivating. Yeah, exactly. You've announced recently this idea of mobility as a service. And I would love to hear what that means and what it would mean for the industry if this kind of thing caught on. Yeah, absolutely. So when we got into this business back in 2017, I'll tell you, there were a couple of wrong assumptions that we made. I don't think we're the only people, but the two wrong assumptions that we made were that CubeSats were going to be the dominant form factor, three U to six U CubeSats.

And so if we had a killer CubeSat propulsion system, that would be the thing. Um, I think what we've really seen in most other people seem to have seen the same thing is it kind of got small and now it's getting big again. Right. And so, um, there's that part of it. The second part that we kind of assumed is that we would be primarily selling to NASA, the Air Force, you know, Boeing and Lockheed or companies like that. The old studies, the old studies, right. And the important part there is they know how to buy propulsion, right? They've been doing this for decades, They know how to send out a request for proposal that has every specific detail very carefully crafted, and they're going to get back exactly the right thing.

What we've seen over the past couple of years is that there has been this awesome, truly inspiring influx of new companies coming into the market with really innovative technologies and business models, but maybe not as much space background. And so we started to get these RFPs that were much more like, hey, I'm launching on a SpaceX on this date, and my satellite needs to be at this altitude by this date. What can you do for me? That's a big open-ended question, right? Because it could be, oh, well, I'm going to build you a propulsion system. Or it could be, oh, I'm going to build you a propulsion system, but I'm also going to help you coordinate with an orbital transfer vehicle, and they're going to take you part of the way. And oh, maybe I'm going to help you get there, but I'm going to also help you refuel your spacecraft over the lifetime. So you don't need as big a propellant

tank, you need a smaller tank. And oh, we need to make sure that you comply with all the regulatory pieces, including coming down at end of life. So we can help you with that. We can help you pair with some of the active debris removal companies, right? We can, there are all these services and pieces that are coming together. And if you're new to the industry, and even if you've been around for a while, there's so much going on, you might not be familiar with all of that. Well, we need to be the mobility experts at Benchmark. Yesterday, we built chemical propulsion systems. We've got a good business doing that. But what we offer to the customer is bigger than just the widget on the shelf, right? It's the true, we're going to solve your mobility problem. And so that's kind of the genesis of this

idea of mobility as a service. Taking away, hey, we're going to build you this box that you know exactly what you want. And really thinking about what is the core question the customer is asking? And it's how do I move around in space? How do I accomplish my mission? And I want to do that for the least amount of money, right? I want the fewest, you know, amount of technical challenges, the least technical risk. That's really what they're asking for. And so we can help to solve that. And so we see it as kind of there are two parts to this story. So one is the combination of hardware, software, and services that allow us to help the customer.

And then the second is, how can we think of innovative business models that support what they're doing? And so an example of that is earlier this year, we signed our first mobility as a service contract with a company. They're an on-orbit inspection company. So they're going to fly around and do inspection for, it could be insurance, it could be for a constellation owner, whatever the case may be. They want to know what's going on. This satellite's going to fly over. Well, that company- Could be trying to find Zuma. If someone wanted to go out and look for Zuma,

we can do a ghost hunt for zuma yeah exactly okay right just be looking around so they they one of the things that they came to us and they said when they said well we need propulsion because you got to be able to go to where the um the uh article in question is but they didn't know ahead of time or they don't know ahead of time exactly how much propellant they need right they couldn't write us an rfp that's like give us this much total impulse or this much delta V. And so what we worked on with them... You mean that because they might be tasked with a different thing that they didn't plan for once they are on orbit? Exactly, right.

They don't know ahead of time exactly which satellites they're going to have to go inspect. And so what we set up with them is what we call our delta V on demand service. And so what we set up with them is what we call our Delta V on demand service. So they're paying a small amount for the hardware on board to make sure that they've got the hardware. And then they pay us as they use the Delta V, the propellant in the spacecraft. Now that does a couple of things. So one, they don't have to pay all up front for that propellant. And two, that means that they're paying when they're getting

paid, right? So that when they generate revenue, they can pay us. We think that that could be a really useful business model for a lot of companies, right, where they don't necessarily know ahead of time. In a similar way, so that's the Delta V on demand. There's also the kind of idea of like a subscription propulsion service, where let's say you've got a constellation, Internet of Things constellation, you're billing your customers on a monthly basis. Wouldn't you like to pay for your satellites or some fraction of your satellites on a monthly basis as that revenue is coming in? And so we can help them kind of realize that. So it's those two parts, those two things that come together for mobility as a service, right? It's like combining of the components and the software, creating the

interface to make all of this possible. And then it's applying that to this business model that is supportive of the new companies that are coming online. And that's the thing that we get really excited about. Yeah, the second one makes a ton of sense in terms of like, you're managing their cash flow for them, essentially. And that helps startup, you know, helps them get their hardware sooner and get it on orbit and then start working. And then I suppose if on the worst case scenario that something happens to the satellite, would hopefully the insurance payment cover paying for the system that you sent their way? How would that work in the bad scenarios that we'd never like to think about? Right. So I mean, the way that we've got the business model set up, there are a couple of

parts to it. So there's some kind of initial payment or down payment that kind of covers a lot of it. And then we're kind of, depending on the customer, how many satellites are going to have, we're kind of, you know, spreading the cost or the risk across all of those satellites. So if anyone gets lost, but the rest of the constellation is still functional, we're doing okay, they're probably doing okay. And yeah, that's the plan. Now, in the first part of the mobility as a service, I'm trying to get my head around your positioning of it, right? Because for a company like Space Flight, and there's others out there that are similarly offering, you know, shuttling services around space, I think that that's a pretty straightforward case for them to make to their customers, or in the inverse, that their customers know to go to them for that sort

of service. As someone who is right now primarily providing propulsion systems, how do you find that communication? Or is it more of a fact that these people are already talking to you about propulsion and you're expanding their mindset about what you can provide them. So they might be attracted because your engines or their thrusters look like what they need. But you're then able to offer them a little bit more than they were expecting. I'm just trying to figure out like, these seem like two complimentary, but but not necessarily coexisting business models for a company, especially a company of, you know, 35 to 50 people? Sure. Yeah. So you nailed it with the second piece here. We get in front of customers relatively early on in the process, because the decision about what propulsion system you're going to use

truly changes what that spacecraft is going to look like. If you're going to have electric propulsion on board, you need room for your power processing unit, you might need larger solar panels, larger batteries, etc. If you're going to use chemical, you're going to need more room for your storage tank, all these different things. And so we're talking to, you know, all these customers really early on in their design process, helping them kind of make that selection. So step one is we want to be able to be kind of that one stop shop for for propulsion. Right now, our expertise is on chemical propulsion. You know, we have is on chemical propulsion. We have some kind of partnerships and support in the works that we'll be able to help identify if we don't have the

right product, we're going to help you get the right product in there. And it can all be supported by kind of our software and avionics layer. That'll be common. So if this mission needs chemical, but that mission needs electric, you're still working with the same interface, you're familiar with it. So that's kind of step one that gets us in front of them. But then the next part, and this is dependent on the ecosystem, the in space ecosystem continuing to develop. So this doesn't exist today. And I'm aware of that. But I also am very bullish that it will be there. Think about how differently you would design a chemical propulsion system, if you knew

that you could refuel every six months, every two years, whatever that looked like, right? So if there were gas stations up there, how would you design your system differently? If you knew that you could get an orbital transfer vehicle or a tug that could come move you around when you needed for large kind of delta V maneuvers, how differently would you design your propulsion system? If you knew that there was a safety net of space sweepers, active debris removal, and so you didn't have to use every, you know, you didn't have to save 10% of your propellant to deorbit yourself because you have that safety net. How would you design your system differently? And if you look at the kind of regulatory and insurance side of things, how would you interact with those agencies if you knew that you had all of this kind of put together and

so that's what we talk about like we talk about like pulling this all like going and offering kind of mission design support and spacecraft design support that says hey i know you've always bought propulsion this way but actually if you look at all of these pieces together this whole ecosystem you could do this different thing it really could change a lot of how people are doing things. And they're not going to just do that. That's not an easy place to be that there's so much going on. And that's our job. That's where we come in. And so that's kind of how I think about it. We're already talking to those customers. Hopefully, we're getting in on the strength of they like our propulsion, or they think it's at least interesting. And now how can we kind of nudge

them that last little bit as this ecosystem develops? So you're more using the fact that you are an early partner for many people as a leverage point to then show your expertise, make that additional connection with them. And then I guess the other part would be like, communicate or connection with them. And then I guess the other part would be like, do you see Benchmark getting into a last mile tug sort of system in the future where you would actually have your own rather than, you know, riding sharing on someone else that you would have your own tug that could take a couple of payloads, drop them off? Is that something that you see Benchmark providing? So we've got some great partnerships with people in the industry that do that part of the business. And so we're really excited to support and to be potentially that kind of

channel partner out in front of that talking to those customers and helping to kind of steer towards that part of it. So I'll say no. Okay, gotcha. We're happy with the ecosystem that we're part of. So the way that spaceflight, just to keep using them as an example, the way that spaceflight partners with launch providers, you're trying to be the spaceflight of spaceflights. Yeah, right, exactly. Where you're fitting them in. You're making your customers more efficient when they're on orbit

and leveraging this whole industry. So that leaves us pretty easily in here to the partnership that you have with Orbitfab on fuel depots in space. And this is, they are developing tankers that are going to be in various spots. They have one on orbit now, right? Did I get my things messed up again? No, that one's on orbit. They just announced they're going to have one into a stationary orbit.

And you are going to be bundling their fuel port, essentially, with all of your thrusters that make it to orbit eventually. Did I get all the details right there? That's correct. Yep, that's the path forward. So you kind of touched on this a second ago, where you're looking into the future, or maybe I should start from a different spot, that there's a lot of people out there today that say refueling satellites doesn't make a lot of sense

because at that point in time, it's cheaper to launch a new one. And that mindset to me, I understand for wherever you're at at the moment. But I think I lean towards your direction of looking into the far future and seeing fuel depots as ubiquitous and saying, what can I do at that point? And it seems like that's the way that you're kind of leaning into this saying, we're going to put a lot of these ports out there so that we solve at least one end of the, well, X doesn't exist, so why does it need to either equation? And I love that mindset. And I would love to hear you expand on why you're going that way and why OrbitFab is particularly interesting.

Yeah. So I don't want to fall into the kind of false narrative around Starship that I see in some places that like only Starship is going to change everything. There will only be one spaceship ever. There can only be one spaceship ever. However, I do think if you look at the kind of economics of what Starship is doing, it's interesting to me because it's driving both of these stories, right? It's interesting to me because it's driving both of these stories, right? So on the one hand, the falling launch cost does drive towards disposable. If launch is cheap enough, why do I care if my satellite's refuelable, right?

There are people who kind of fall into that camp. And I understand from an economic point of view how that might look. The flip side of it is if launch is cheap enough, it's really easy to get things like commodities like propellant into space. Right. Like that. That's kind of how this whole thing works. And what we're seeing is just satellites are actually they're getting more expensive again. And I don't know if it's really obvious, but, you know, we talked about like they're getting bigger, but they're also getting much more. The business models that are coming out today, it's not enough to just put a camera on your spacecraft, right? There are companies that do, Planet does that.

They're the best at that, right? They're crushing it. How am I going to compete with Planet just by putting a camera on? But where I might be able to compete is I came out of a university or an R&D lab and I invented the next new best sensor for you know methane or something that that one's been done but you know what i mean right there something like that but that's more expensive than just putting a camera on there so this idea that satellites are just going to be infinitely disposable i just don't see it right you see some of these really awesome um synthetic aperture radar constellations that's not cheap they don't want those things to just burn up even if they

could launch them inexpensively they're not cheap to manufacture but you're getting on i mean this is the same logic that like iphones should cost five dollars today right like they started and they were a thousand dollars they were two hundred dollars for a little bit and then now they're back to thirteen hundred dollars because the cameras are amazing and there's like optical image stabilization so you you use the the dropping costs elsewhere to push your capabilities into the future, which keeps it at a certain baseline. Exactly. Exactly. Right. This idea that satellites are going to get super cheap. It just, no, falling launch costs means that we can put more money into other things. We can do more interesting things.

And it also makes the fact that your components are getting more expensive. If launch and fuel are cheap enough, those eventually become the most expensive thing. Whereas right now they are not the most expensive thing. So we lean towards that direction, but if everything works out, they should be the most expensive thing. Right. Yeah, exactly. So, um, so maybe what'll happen is you'll, you'll, you know, continue to see this bifurcation of really cheap disposable satellites. But our customers, in many cases, have really interesting, expensive satellites, they need them to stay up for a long time to get the ROI that they need. And if there were enough fueling stations up there, that we

could reliably count on that. And that's what OrbitFab is doing, right? They push them forward, they just got their funding from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. They are like, you know, industry leaders in this. And we're big believers. And obviously, we're working with them. So if there are enough stations up there, you can build your satellite, knowing that that's the case. And that really does kind of change things. So that's where we see the future being. As far as the reason that we work with OrbitFab, there are kind of two parts here that we're really like about them and kind of see eye to eye on. So one, you know, they've announced, I think, relatively recently, you know, a big part of what they're

doing is trying to make this into an industry standard. Their goal is not to make money off of that port. So, you know, we can be building it with them, you know, other people could be building that port into their spacecraft. They're, you know, they want to be on the commodities, they want to be the gas station company, right, not the fuel port company. And we like that, because it's going to take some amount of standardization. You know, we can't, like, you know, driving around the country wouldn't make sense if you only had, you know, every gas station at a different port, right, you have to kind of have some standardization. The other thing is that they share a vision and they put out papers about this. And we've talked to them about this for a long time.

That water is, you know, the new oil, right? Like that, they didn't coin that phrase. Other people have said it, but water is the oil of the ecosystem. And hydrogen peroxide, which can be synthesized from water, is a very effective monopropellant and oxidizer for bipropellant systems. And so, you know, when they were thinking about what is the first station that we're going to put up, what is the thing that we're going to demonstrate on? It was hydrogen peroxide, because they share that vision with us. And so great partnership,

we're really excited for the work that they're doing. You know, they're going to do lots of stuff that they are going to support other propellants as well. The geo is hydrazine, they're going to do xenon, they're going to do other things as well. But over the long term, you know, we think that they're going to be the right backbone, right partner for us. Heading in a similar direction, you know, complementary visions, that kind of thing. Exactly. Now the port itself, you know, I obviously mentioned, there's a couple different propellants they're using and that's the same port for everything it's same standard i guess there would be maybe some differences uh with the actual propellants themselves but the interfaces is common across all of those yeah the interface is common uh they have a low pressure version for liquids and a high

pressure version for gas see this is the thing that i think we also like this is the one that's going to take a bit to shake out but it is really something that that is key before we get to ubiquitous fuel depots well you got to be able to use them you know and then yeah we're seeing a similar thing now on on earth right with like you know electric vehicle charging stations and stuff like that but um so it's we got some equivalent but it's obviously a longer term thing with just the length of time that space takes so it's cool to know you know with just the length of time that space takes. So it's cool to know, you know, it makes a lot more sense when you put it in context with your vision for being more than just the propulsion company. You know, it seems directly in line with what you've gotten on your mind for the future. Yeah, thank you. There's definitely some shakeout

that's going to happen. I think that the magic and people are working on this is, you know, multi-mode propulsion systems. So a common propellant that could drive both, you know, EP and CP engines, you know, that is down the road and we haven't quite cracked that nut yet. But if we can start to standardize around some EP propellants and some CP propellants, I think we could be in a pretty good spot. Now, in terms of the actual operations there, this might be something more that I should get people from Orbit Fab 1 to talk about. But I'm curious about, you know, they have these depots in space.

For your customers, would they have to make their way over to those depots? Do you think there would be the depots stationary, but there would be some vehicle that is the go between? Or do the depots themselves have rendezvous and proximity operations capabilities to go up to your customer satellites? Yeah, so it's there are a couple of different models that are developing around that. I think the because different spacecraft will have different capabilities. So not every case that the spacecraft is going to have the rendezvous and proximity operations capability, the RPO capability to dock with the fueling station. And so in that case, OrbitFab is looking at doing tenders, right,

that would go and deliver the fuel specifically. But they are also preparing for, and the fuel stations have the capability to do the docking directly with a spacecraft that is equipped. So we build RPO kits for spacecraft. So all the thrusters necessary that can tie in with a software, we do the GNC algorithms and everything to support that. So we can support a customer that wants to be able to dock directly with a fuel depot, but Orbitfab also has part of their business model. We'll be building tenders or having a company built for them, I guess, but tenders to do that delivery. Now, are these the Rafty port, right? Rafty is the way I should say that. That is going to go with every single one of your systems? Or, are there cases where your customer site might say, you know, I don't really want one, or I have a use case that, you know, this thing isn't going to last more than three years. How does that shake out on your end? Yeah. So we're, we're ramping up to, um, a hundred percent integration. Um,

we're not quite there yet. So, uh, the two things I'll say, they are making continuous improvements to Raph D they're kind of standardizing around and making sure that it is as small as can be. So you're right, the trade there is just kind of on the volume and mass side of things. Am I getting value for this? What we see is they made some really smart choices in the development. And one of the ones that they made is that it replaces the ground fueling port. It's actually a very the ground fueling port. It's actually a very effective ground fueling port.

And so for us, we get the benefit of, um, an effective ground fueling port that we can plug directly into. So even if it never refuels, we are getting some benefit out of it, which means our customer is getting benefit out of it. And we are true leaders that having that, you can never change it once you've made that decision. But having that option is always valuable. Customer might say, I'm never going to use that. But if it's there, who knows, right? And if it doesn't cost them more, and I don't just mean physical cost, but volume, mass, if it doesn't cost them more, and they have that option, why not?

If it makes it easier, why not? So that's where we're heading. And we're working with the team at OrbitFab to make that the reality. Well, I'm at the end of my list of questions. Was there something I should have had on this list that I missed? Or did we do a good run through of everything you've got going over there? Yeah, I think you kind of hit on the big things, the mobility as a service. I mean, we're really excited.

We've got some, you know, I guess that's the problem is we can't talk about all of the cool things that we have coming up yet, but we've got like five launches scheduled for next year. It's really going to pop here in the now-introduced future. So not to presuppose, but maybe in, I don't know, six months or a year, there might be more stuff I can share with you.

Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on. I'm sure this was interesting to everyone out there because I learned a lot and had a great time talking about all this kind of stuff. And I love the way that you're looking at the future of Earth orbit and beyond. So thanks again for coming on. Awesome. I really appreciate the time. Have a good one. Thanks again to Ryan for coming on the show. It was a fantastic conversation. I feel like that went places I wasn't exactly expecting it and definitely learned a lot talking with him and hope you enjoyed it as well. Once again, thank you all so much for your support over at managingcutoff.com slash support. Don't forget about Miko Headlines if you'd like some more podcasting and some more Anthony

in your life. That's a great way to do it. And with that, that is all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, I will talk to you soon.