Main Engine Cut Off - T+214: Andrew Maximov, Founder of Precious Payload

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Andrew Maximov, founder of Precious Payload, joins me to talk about what he and his team have been working on, what they see as the missing pieces in the industry, and why they think they are building the right set of tools for where things are headed.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Simon, Lauren, 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, Andrew, and seven anonymous—and 773 other supporters.TopicsPrecious Payload – Do rocket science. We'll do the rest.Precious Payload (@preciouspayload) / Twitter‘Bringing space down to Earth for everyday people... using software?’ Precious Payload meets MECO - YouTubeThe 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 NASA/Ben Smegelsky

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. I've got a special conversation today with Andrew Maximov, who is the founder of Precious Payload and actually somebody who's been around the MECO off-nominal community for quite a number of years now. I remember a couple of years back on the off-nominal discord, which you can get access to at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. I remember Andrew posting that he had just founded this company called Precious Payload and was talking about their plans. And it's been cool to follow along for this many years. And I thought it'd be a good time to sit down and talk about what they're working on, why they see their product fitting into the

market so well, what they're trying to solve for people trying to get to space. And generally, you know, the theme that we talk about a lot of everyone's working on launch, but what other parts of the industry need help to be revolutionized as well, to make things easier to, you know, lower the barrier to entry to space, that kind of stuff. So that's what I wanted to talk to Andrew about. So without further ado, let's give him a call. Andrew, it is pleasure to talk to you. It's been we've been chatting a little bit about this in advance to try to organize. So I just want to give a shout out to everyone out there that if you're listening via audio on the main engine cutoff feed, there's a video version of this over on the precious payload YouTube channel.

So we'll have a link in the show notes for that. I just want to get that out there in case. I know there's a lot of people that prefer video. Maybe they want to see us. Maybe we'll show some stuff as we go. So I just want to put that out there at first. But how is it going today there, Andrew? It's doing fantastic. It's a pleasure to be talking to you live here.

And yeah, I've been a fan of the show. I've been sharing it among all my friends and peers and colleagues for last couple of years and yeah huge supporter of the amico and the community of getting discord yeah i remember i was thinking about this um you i think it was when you launched the company that you posted something in discord years ago um and so it's cool to see you come along this way and and like be able to track what you've been working on these years. It sounds like you're getting to a very, very cool time in the company's lifespan here. Let's start with what is Precious Payload?

How did it begin? What was your inspiration to start this kind of business, and what is it that you're bringing to the market overall? Oh, yeah, sure. I just noticed that it's been five years since we started working on the concept and the company. So, yeah, it's been a long time. So, yeah, what Precious Payout is today

is we are building this set of developer tools for the space industry, similar to you can call it like AWS for space. What we're trying to do is we're trying to reduce the complexity of the space industry to empower the non-space companies, non-space people, to start leveraging space infrastructure to solve the problems in their businesses, to solve problems here

on Earth. And yeah, just again, to quote our sort of mutual friends, to bring the space down to Earth to everyday people. Yeah, this is exactly what we do. The way that you put it there, that you're trying to bring the non-space types into the space industry, that seems to be a little bit of a theme in the industry um blue origin when they announced orbital reef their commercial space station project they very much had the a similar tone there where they're looking for people that

haven't yet really taken full advantage of the space industry today and they're trying to partner with people that might not have all of like the vested knowledge that you need to be able to pull off a complex space mission and then fill in the gaps of what they're working on in the realm of human spaceflight. For the side of the industry that you're focused on, is it that you found through your experience that there's just too much specialized knowledge that you need to be able to complete the architecture of a mission? What are the gaps there that you're trying to fill in for

somebody that has not approached the space industry before? Yeah, absolutely. I think what all these companies get excited about is how to build even more infrastructure, how to build more rockets, more custom buses for satellites, more propulsion modules. And I think while it's great, it doesn't really excite people and doesn't inspire new founders to go and try to tinker with the satellite technology to solve the problems of agriculture companies, mining companies, or aviation companies. And I think the idea they have in mind is that if you look at the last, let's say, 40 years of technology innovation,

per se, if you know this concept of tech waves, we had the dawn of personal computing, then we have the dawn of the computing, then we have dawn of internets, then we have mobile. Now they're thinking like, what's next big tech wave? Is it metaverse? Is it Web3, crypto or something else? So what I'm thinking is that if we all in the space industry, if we're all trying to make space the next tech wave,

so that's really like the whole humanity, not like just Silicon Valley, would get excited about, so excited that every small media enterprise, every SME will have a satellite or a payload in space. That's what I want you to see. I want really like in the same fashion that today, just every business has the online presence.

You cannot run the business without the online presence. I want to bring the business of space to the state where yes, of course it makes sense for your corporation to have their own satellite or at least have some lease capacity on the existing satellite. The question I have is

if the common ground that we need to bring space to that level, so what the user experience should be like. If in a PC era you had visual basic, you had some basic stuff that would let you start thinking just from a dorm room, right? If same can be done with like, I don't know, Coinbase, you get a Coinbase and start trading crypto and doing some stuff on Ethereum, right? Like what is it that's simple tool that brings you very close to the space industry? So that's kind of what we want to bring to the people rather than saying, hey, like, you know, there's another space station that's going to build in the next 10 years.

And you can play with it, you know, if you can afford it, maybe sometime in the future. Yeah. What's interesting is that a lot of the industry has been very focused on launch the past 10 years, right? That's where a lot of the money has been flowing. That's where a lot of the attention has been of like, let's get people to space cheaper. And there hasn't been a ton of companies that have focused outside of their own business model on enabling what actually happens once you get off the launch vehicle, right? Like, great, we've spent a lot of energy focused on the first eight minutes of getting to the thing. And it's, you know, you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system. So that is a very large part of what it takes to do business in space. But, you know, if everyone continues to focus solely on launch, there won't be a lot of things to do with those launch vehicles. And I think the pertinent side here is to talk a little bit about the launch aggregators, the rideshare businesses that have been cropping up spaceflight,

and now there's a bunch of others. SpaceX has gotten into it directly, that have focused on getting smaller payloads to space. Are there things that, I don't know if you've experienced working with those kind of companies before, but they tend to do a lot of mission management for a customer. But what are the things that they're missing out there that that you see an opening for you know the precious payload to handle some other parts of the business what is it that they're missing in in you know focusing on your mission management

from a launch perspective sure um i think that they're not like they do a great job, all of them, of providing the best services out there for exactly dropping you off at the desired point in space on orbit. And they do a lot of value add services that we refer to as mission management with the primary goal of making sure that you don't cause any problems on the launch pad right so they say hey like of course we're going to help you of course we're going to help you you know to find the necessary hardware uh for attaching your satellite to the upper stage launch vehicle of course we're going to help you with documents but why we're doing that is because we want you to be as compliant as possible with our regulators so we don't like we don't experience the problems while we are aggregating all these dozens of satellites

from around the world. We don't want to have any problems because otherwise it's going to cause delay or end work installation on the entire flight. And we've seen it many times. But the real question here is that I would say that when you work, when a customer or when a satellite mission or the satellite team work on a satellite, they work with, they look into access to space as the problem they're trying to solve. is that they don't necessarily, like my favorite thing that I do with the customers, I talk them out of actually launching a satellite or building the satellite.

Because I feel that a lot of, like majority of the companies that enter the space industry with their ideas of launching payloads, they get so excited and entrenched in this valley of, hey, we'll have our own satellite on orbit. Let's do that. Let's figure it out. Let's get on SpaceX rockets so we can do a PR release

that Elon Musk is sending our payload to space. This is like literally, I'm actually quoting not even one customer's, sorry. Yeah, and actually do that, right? And my favorite thing to do is that, you know, I ask them, why do you need that? Like, what are you trying to achieve, right? If the answer is, hey, like,

we're there to just increase the technology readiness level of our payloads, I always find a way to make sure that they know the options. And so if I can talk them out from building the satellite and say, hey, like, you can just either host your sensor on someone else's payload, or you can, you know, again, it's been the case, multiple cases of our clients, you can just launch in a suborbital rocket, you will get exposure to space environment for dozens of minutes, you'll get all the pictures you want, you'll get the data,

and hey, the best part, you'll get your payload back. You'll get your entire system back on the parachute safely, and you can relaunch it again. So I think for me the concept of mission management is not just, hey, let's get you on the rocket and make sure that you've got your compliance, etc. It's rather, hey, let's look at the business case. Let's look at the business objectives. Let's talk to your end customer. Why do you even want to send this camera to space?

What does your customer want? And then walking backwards from the end user, because that's what I care. I think that the space economy would be sustainable only if we start working backwards from the end user requirements and not just get too excited about just launching, launching satellites and building better rockets. So yeah, I call the mission management when you, as a startup, you go and talk to the end users, when you, as a startup, you go and talk to the end users, you work backwards from their problems, and then you decompose that into the task orders for the space industry, if and when it makes sense.

So yeah, it's a long answer to the short question, sorry. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's an interesting take that it's more about the strategy leading up to any particular component of the mission, right? Because launch is just one part of it. You've got ground systems and ground controls that you need. You've got actually managing the data that's coming out of your payload is a big part of it as well. And, you know, we've talked about this on a couple of shows that it's great that Planet has so many satellites,

but they also, and they're taking, you know, I don't even know how many photos they they take a day of earth but they also need to be able to deal with that amount of data and make sense of it and then get it to customers so there's there's a lot more than just you know overly focusing on the engineering of the particular payload which is always a tough thing right because for us space nerds a lot of us got interested in the industry by nerding out on low level engineering details but when you look at it from a business level, there's so many different components that you need to get right. And the ground control one, I'm interested to pick your brain on a bit because over the past couple of years, there's been a lot of new entrants

into that ground control market where you've got companies like Amazon Web Services getting into that. There's ones that are specifically focused like KSAT that were kind of built out with that idea in mind. When you look at the websites for these things, as somebody who isn't well-versed in that kind of system, it's hard to really sense why it is that those things are important and how it hooks in with your mission. And I can tell something that if you're coming into the space industry and you haven't really interacted with it before, you might not even think about that aspect of getting your data down to the ground. So how do you look at that side of the industry?

What is it that you're teaching your customers about when it comes to the ground systems? Yeah. Okay. Andrew, the teacher, not talks. Yeah. Sure. So I think you already said that, like, this is exactly what happens with the majority of the customers that work in their first mission. They just forget that round segment and

like, you know, providing the connectivity for tasking your satellite, controlling your satellite and also downloading data is actually why you send something to space. Like you're not sending something to space and leave it there. You are sending it there so you can control it and beam down the data. And data is your goal of the mission, regardless of the nature of the mission. Like you can launch your new innovation propulsion system, but you just need data from it to understand

whether it did perform as expected or not, right? And to make it even worse, like what happens with 90% of the customers we talk to who are working on their first mission, they're just doing, you know, like this common waterfall approach, right? They say, all right, what do we got here? Like, let's do some plan, like a project plan. Then let's go and find the launch, because why not? Launch, we can do a lot of PR about launch, securing the launch and getting into SpaceX, why not? And then once they secure the launch, you say, okay, what's next in the project? And they go and start looking at the ground station segments. And I would say in

at least half of the cases, all these beautiful companies, there's KSAT and Amazon, Arbitrary Signals and the others, they're going to say, hey, you should have talked to us earlier because yes, congratulations that you've got your launch, but we either don't have the antennas to support the orbits and or you need to reconfigure

your entire communication subsystem on a satellite to make it happen. So we wish you, you know, you've talked to us at the beginning, you know, and that's where what needs to be happening is, you know, you and I were both in the software industry. So just take a gel approach, right? Where you say, all right, can we do like both? Like, can we sort of go and say, all right, can we do both? Can we go and instead of go in waterfall, can we just get the launch options, show it to the rest of the community

of the ground stations, and bring them both data sets saying, okay, here's my satellite project, here's my communication subsystem. This is my desired orbit. And those are the launch options that I've got from different launch providers. Can you help me understand what will be the scenarios if I pick the launch option A versus launch option B? Because the input from the ground station providers is really important at that stage. And that also works with the rest of the building blocks, the primitives of the space mission, because in order to make

your mission faster and reduce the time it costs and increase the velocity of missions, you need to be able to make it a flexible equation. Your simultaneous has to be, like your simultaneous need to be able to just, you know, lay the cards on the table and say, tell me what's possible, what's not. And then you reshuffle the cards and then you like optimize your route to space.

This is, I feel what needs to be happening. And yeah, this is exactly what we are building for the ground station community as well. It's interesting to think about that as, as like the fact that there are all those different variables that you need to consider to actually find the right mix because it could be

that depending on what your ground control and ground station requirements are it might make sense to get a more expensive launch that gets you in the right spot for what you're actually near your mission because it's going to save you money on the back end by having a better ground station setup or maybe it's just straight up like that's what you need to actually pull off the mission that you have in mind. And it's not as simple as finding the cheapest launch and finding the cheapest ground station and finding the cheapest components. If the whole mix overall doesn't check off the boxes of your business requirements. And I guess that's like, again, from the person that's coming into the industry, looking at these as parallel paths is it makes sense to us in like every area of life, except when you get overly fixated on certain details.

Yeah. And, you know, there's other things that you have listed on the site as well as areas that you're interested on. Insurance is one that I'm always curious when people start talking about insurance because it is such a completely opaque side of the industry from people that aren't actually signing insurance deals. It is hard for me, as somebody who digs into a lot of stuff, to find details on specific insurance plans that are out there or insurance premiums that have been paid by different customers. And I know on the smaller side of the industry, there's different constraints because the amount that you're insuring is so small that these large companies might not even be interested in insuring something like that. So maybe can we talk a little bit about the insurance side and how that fits into the mission planning that you're working your customers through day to day? Sure, absolutely. So first of all, yeah, today? Sure, absolutely. So first of all, yeah, you're right that insurance is not a very exciting topic. So it's definitely less exciting than doing the PR with Elon Musk and everything.

But again, from the standpoint of sustainability of the space economy and the commercialization of efforts of the space industry, it's like, you know, it's one big pillar that protects the downsides of the investors and backers of the satellite technology companies and, you know, terrestrial businesses trying to launch them into space. And that's like having the proper insurance and proper downside protection. It's the tool that brings more money to the industry per se, and it brings more, I would say, sustainable money. So there's a lot of investors who would say, hey, I'm not, I cannot, I legally fiduciary, I cannot invest in something risky, right? So

the insurance and placing the right insurance gets more missions to the community and brings more investors and more players eventually to the space industry. So I just wanted to underline the fact that it's really important and it's not just, you know, the paperwork that's mandatory for some missions. Right. And as you rightly said, the like, if you look at the new space where all the bleeding edge technology management is happening, there's an aspect of it that all this innovation happens with small satellites and these tiny CubeSats. And as you said, the sum insured, so like the insurance premiums on those small deals and

small cubesets are just not exciting for traditional insurance companies, insurance brokerage companies that got used to placing like multi-dozen million insurance placements for the geostation satellites, right? Because the entire ecosystem has been working in these geostation markets, and they experience healthy premiums and margins there, right? And that one just doesn't scale down to the CubeSats and SmallSats. And so our approach here is that we figured out that what actually prohibits these patient insurance companies to work on small SaaS and skip SaaS is that they have to go through huge underwriting process and KYC process for every client that they have. So every individual university or startup has to go

through the entire process. And that process takes months and just costs again hours and hours and days and weeks of consulting time of the insurance company right so after talking to i would say five or six main players in the space insurance market we just figured that if you are being quite aggressive in taking the risks on the company like ours, you can get to the point where the insurance community can do the underwriting once on Precious Payload as a company and say, hey, do we trust these guys enough so we can give them like a blank policy for, you know, a couple of million dollars and give them the ability to just add their end customers to the policy. And we'll just close our eyes and say, okay, we trust the judgments of this intermediary enough.

So they would just, you know, add their end customers and let's see what happens. And that is only possible if you built the robust system in place that would collect all the data and basically fill in the long KYC list and technical analysis that this underwriter have. And they can say, hey, as long as at your best judgment, you feel like you ticked all the boxes. So if there's a claim, you can show us the entire data sets on the company. And as long as you believe that you collected everything and you underwrote the risk, of course, provided you have the proper licensing, then we're going to close our eyes and do whatever you want. And that's something that we've been working on for a number of months now.

And I hope that, again, it's kind of a slow process, but I hope that that really will introduce the innovative insurance products for the small-sized community. And again, just bring more place and more funding to the industry. I feel like a term that you should steal is that Precious Payload is an expertise aggregator, right? Because you've got expertise in all these different systems. So you're able to take the expertise that you have from looking at different components of a mission and reuse that data both to help customers make better decisions but like you're saying also share that expertise with the insurance side who would have spent a lot of time trying to dig into every little detail um but but they're outsourcing that expertise to you uh and and i've i find that that the venn diagram of the way that converges makes a lot more sense to my brain that um where you do

have you know we mentioned earlier the ride share companies, they have expertise about what launch options are out there and how they take advantage of that to make sure that they can get their customers to the right vehicles. You have a wider view where it's like, well, we want to be experts in so many different parts of the industry that we can help people make a very sensible, you know, start to end a business plan that includes sharing bits of that expertise to different pieces of the industry where it's needed. And I find that like, you know, as somebody who, sure, if you're a giant company, you could hire enough experts to check off those boxes, you could hire a ground station expert, and you can hire an insurance expert, and you can hire,

you know, all these different components. But when you're, especially when you're starting out or if you're a small company or an organization, like there's just so many instances when you don't want to do that and you don't have the resourcing to even hire people like that. So that seems very attractive to me. And it's like, in that way, who do you look at in the industry as competitors in that environment? Sure. I mean, there are, again,

you already mentioned that there are a lot of companies that provide like mission management services as a part of their core services. And I would say that not their competitors because they're partners, but companies that have the same mission of, again, just bringing the space to non-space companies. They used to be called host and payload companies. Now they refer to themselves as space and service companies. In fact, if you go and look at the S1 filings of all these SPAC companies that went public in the last 18 months, all these SPAC companies that went public in the last 18 months, they all, regardless where they started, be it satellites or launch vehicles, they all say, hey, we are ultimately becoming a space and service company.

We're tackling the space applications markets. They are all about that. And again, the difference is that when you flip the slides and look at the solution, they all say, hey, by the way, in order to get ourselves in space application market, we'll just launch more rockets, we'll just launch more satellites, we'll just put more hardware to space. And that's part of the deal. As I said, they will do whatever makes sense to help the customer,

just to make sure that the customer ships their hardware to their integration facility. They will get the customer's hardware, integrate in their hosted payloads in the clean room, and they will sell them proprietary hardware. They will send them the genuine hours, and that's how they turn profit and make the margin. Just different equation. Where I think that if the real problem and the mission is to bring custom experience, like CX custom experience to the customers to reduce the complexity of space,

not increase the complexity, but reduce the complexity is the mission, then I believe you need to have sole focus on the software and sole focus on having the best expertise in the world on building the like b2b software that reduces the complexity of complex i would say transactions and complex interactions between the companies and this is exactly what space industry is and it's exactly what we are bringing on the table. So focus on the customer experience using the best software. That's it. Can you give us an idea for who your typical customers are these days, whether or not you can name them specifically,

but just talk about what kind of companies that you find fit best with Precious Payload as an organization? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. We just started publishing the case studies. So we got the approval from the clients to start sharing what we've been doing with them for the last six to eight months.

And so a couple of case studies are already online on our website. But yeah, my favorite one is ResearchSat of Australia. That's why I'm excited about this company. First, they are funded by their customer, which is a very rare bird in the space industry. There's actually a company, they're doing the research for pharmaceutical industry,

and they're studying how the space environment can influence the mutation of bacteria. And like, you know, they need microgravity conditions. They need the exposure to space radiation. And they're just my favorite client because, A, it's not a typical space company. It's, you know, the terrestrial business from a studio company has funded this company to do the space research, right?

And this is amazing. I think we need more of this because, yes, I really, really like working with the companies that are launching yet another propulsion module or yet another, like, supermagnet space. But I'm always trying to say, hey, like, how about the customers? Do you have, you know, real deals? Do you, you know, have you talked to the customers hey, how about the customers? Do you have real deals? Have you talked to the

customers recently? Do you still have the deposits from them? Why are we doing this? And research scientists just say, hey, we don't have any venture backers behind us. We just have a customer who has paid for space research. So yeah, that's my favorite one. venture backers behind us. We just have a customer who has paid for space research. So yeah, that's my favorite one. That's a cool one too, because you're right that like, I don't know, I find this with the ISS program a lot, that there's a lot of times when you read about the kind of research that's flying to the space station, and most of it's run of the mill. And then every once in a while, you're like, huh, that's a company I never thought would do stuff in space that are just exploring what the options are to even you know i feel like a

lot of people have not committed to their brains yet of like what kind of research is useful and possible when you have uh cheaper platforms and the iss had a lot of subsidized platforms to get payloads and experiments up to the iss specifically like the us USS or the US National Lab portion of that. But I think it's still it's still a high barrier right now. So, you know, as costs tend to drop over time, they're not dropping as fast as a lot of people would like getting access to space. But that brings the barrier down to for companies that are not traditional space companies to start thinking about it and start playing with the ideas because if it's significantly less expensive to even take some of those projects on,

they become a lot more interesting because maybe it's, you know, a hobby fund that a company looks at and it's like, what, let's do some experiments here. Let's see what we can do in space. Um, but that you knock a couple of zeros off the price and it looks more interesting than it does today. I don't know a lot of companies that are going to be like, yeah, let's do some experiments for $30 million. But if it's $3 million or $300,000, that looks a lot more interesting to a lot of people. That's true.

That's true. And yeah, by the way, Anthony, how old are you? 31. I don't know. I had to think about that for too long. But yeah. Yeah. When did you get the internet connection to your home for the first time?

Oh, man. I was young enough that I don't remember exactly what year it was, but it was definitely in the 90s. In the 90s. When was the first time you published something on HTML? When was the first time you like published something on html like you know when when was the first time you ever published some website online i'm gonna say it was like seventh or eighth grade i would say so that's like oh three or oh four where did you host it oh god if i could remember that i would

have an incredible memory i don't know it was probably like AOL or something. Something like that. You know, I think you had AOL homepages back in the day. I think it was that. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Because I still remember when it was 2001. And I still remember that I convinced my dad, who ran a business of like selling and servicing the 3D printers.

I convinced him, hey, that's like, I don't really believe you should go to all these trade shows to find the customers, you know, there's Finko Internet, you know, let's, you know, let's do some e-commerce magic here. Right. And remember that, you know, I convinced him that, you know, you need to have a website. Let's, you know, me and my friends, we'll just, you know, do some coding and we'll put up this website. Customers will find you, et cetera, et cetera. And then he said, sure, yeah, let's do that. And then remember that, you know, when you just want to get a simple webpage online, what,

what we've done is that you first go to your ISP and you ask them to give you this static IP address. Then you like, they will lay like a separate cable to your home office. Then you go and buy the components to build the home server. Then you have to hook it up to the backup power. Then you go and rip off some Windows server on Torrents because you cannot afford the license. So you go and scramble some software software like the old version whatever and then you like you install the that software then you install this apache web server php server sql server all separately and

you like you code them in the notepad like tinker with the settings then you go and like you know i had this huge books called like PHP coding, whatever. Then you like learn to call it PHP, HTML, CSS. And then after like six or eight months, you have this thing online and yeah, it just sits under your table. And then, you know, I remember this feeling that, you know, we spent like entire year

just to get this MVP done. Hopefully that's, ah, and then by the way, then you go to the Google. Was it Google by that time or was it AltaVista? AltaVista, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves probably was around. And then you manually feed it page by page

saying like, right, this is homepage. Here's a page to index. Yes, yes. Like manually create the index of a new feed it manual to the search engine. So I still remember that feeling, and this is what I feel about the space industry today. I feel that, all right, if I really get excited and I know that, hey, I want to put the sensor in space, it's going to solve a lot of problems.

We'll have new data sets. We can discover new mining deposits or have more data from the agricultural fields that i have whatever you know like there's that excitement but then people start just you know saying okay where do i start where do i go right so yeah what they just log through all these different very expertise ridden components and just not there like you don't have even you don't even have that you, you don't have even, you don't even have that, you know, you don't have this PHP, SQL, hardware, whatever. You can't torrent a big part of a space mission. You can't do that today.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's what frustrates me. Like, you know, I want, like, because I see all the special people around me, you know, like I support a community of 30, 40, 50 founders who are trying to get something in space, right? Use space to solve some problems that they see in their industries, but you just can't. Like, you know, the best advice I can give them that's, hey, you know, like go to the nearest conference, start there, like travel there, get to know people after like six months, maybe you'll start this,

it will start to make sense for you, maybe so that's the grim reality and that's something that really really frustrates me and they you know what then like the my favorite company uh in the space industry now is the company called skyfi have you heard of them yeah yeah yeah because what they do they enable you to they build the app on the iphone right that enables you to task the satellites and just take pictures of where you are like a wedding reception or future hiking spots and like you know just get the real satellites to take a picture for you and make it available on your iphone i mean i think that's amazing that's we need more tools like that to inspire people to do something in space

well that is a pretty solid ending i feel like that you stuck the landing there so i don't have too much else on my list was there stuff that you were hoping to get to that we didn't cover yet or do you feel like we uh made the rounds pretty pretty well there i think we're good. I'm just looking over my notes here. Yeah, I feel we're good. Just maybe the last piece. I just think that everything that we the space community, they really underestimate how Starship is going to change the way we think about space. I think a lot of, not only other launch vehicles, but a lot of concepts will become obsolete the moment Starship gets online and starts soliciting the request for proposals for commercial operations

yeah it's just just i just think that's a lot of people underestimate the the importance of it what i think a lot of people overly focus on the cost in that equation and not necessarily the sheer amount of mass that that thing would put into orbit and and how that changes you know do you need to worry about every single gram that goes onto your satellite anymore yeah or can you make other trade-offs you know and and those trade-offs just aren't available right now because it does cost so much because even you know to spacex credit falcon 9 is a much more affordable launch vehicle than most of the industry but it's not a magnitude different yet right it's it's cheaper but it's not knocking zeros off the price

so some of the changes that i think there was hope that spacex would bring to the industry haven't quite materialized yet because there's still too many zeros there and so you couple a very significant cost decrease plus being able to trade more mass for other capabilities and that mix is something that, you're right, will scramble the industry and it will be a weird adjustment phase. But whatever comes out the other end will be very interesting to watch.

True. And I think, yeah, to add to that, totally agree. And to add to that, I think the biggest behavioral change is not going to be about the mass, but about the volume and the shape, right? What can you do if the volume and the shape of the satellite

is not that big of a constraint? Because I remember when SpaceX posted this, or Elon Musk himself posted that small picture of the Starlink stack, I couldn't sleep the entire night. It just blew my mind. How can you go from, you know, the rectangular shape or whatever, like cubic shape, just flat shape like that.

How can you, you know, what the heck? Like it's never been done before. Yeah, you watch the other constellation companies and the way they stack their satellites and then SpaceX spins up an upper stage and flings 60 satellites off and they're like okay that's totally different and to their credit you know they bought swarm uh within the last year and and swarm's company that was taking obviously much smaller scale right they're they're doing the quarter cube sets um but that was a similar thing where it was a completely different way of thinking about the volume of what you're given on any given launch.

Yeah, that's true. So imagine what would happen with the volume that Starship is proposing at the price point that people think they would propose in the industry. I think just, again, a lot of space applications could be, and the business model applications could be unlocked just because of Starship. And yeah, I think the entire industry would be shaken in the next couple of years because of that. Yeah, the one thing that I'm hedging against is that it requires a second competitor to put pressure on SpaceX, right? Because right now, in terms of launch costs on the scale that they operate in Falcon 9,

they have the run of the place because they can undercut everyone and still make good margins, but that's still a $55 million launch or whatever it is. On the smaller satellite side of things, there's a different race going on with the new small sat competitors. So does SpaceX see those as the competitors that are putting pressure on them? I'm not quite sure yet. I still feel like they need some downward pressure on them to actually cut their cost as low as they have promoted so far. So I'm hedging a little bit from my perspective

on exactly what that initial price would be for the first couple Starship launches. But we'll see exactly how, you know, we've already started to see some from Rocket Lab. Neutron's a new concept that they're putting out there that is, you know, targeted at where the industry is going to be in five or 10 years. Relativity has some interesting ideas as well in terms of launch. So I'm keeping my eye on who is that other competitor that's going to put the pressure on SpaceX to fulfill that six-digit cost to launch Starship to orbit. True, yeah. I'm also like, I'm a bit,

I'm completely with you on the thought that you shared in one of the previous episodes where you said, I think you were talking about the Pleuridion, that we all wish that Pleuridion would just drop New Glenn and just go do something else. And I think that's the message I want to convey to all other launch providers, like all other 130 that are there.

Just, hey, just drop a rocket, do something else. Consider it done. Consider that access to space, going orbital is solving, like the problem has been solved already. What can we do if that's, what would you put the resources to if you know that that problem is already solved, right? So yeah. Great advice.

And for any of those people that have those ideas, preciouspayload.com, is there anything else that you want to send people if they're interested in learning more about the particular products you're offering? No, that's it. Everything is on the webpage. It grows every week. We put something else there.

We recently introduced the change log to the products that's being posted there every two weeks. And yeah, by the way, we run the weekly newsletter that is a curated newsletter just on satellites, access to space and rockets. It has now over 7,000 subscribers and growing

every week. So yeah, you can find it also on burstpale.com. Awesome. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Andrew, and I hope to chat sometime, maybe in real life at a conference or something, now that things are drifting their way back to normal. It'd be cool to hang out sometime. 100%. Thanks, Anthony. Thanks again to Andrew for chatting. That was a really cool conversation to hear different perspectives on what the industry needs than I think we typically

hear. So very cool to hear what Precious Payload is up to and this episode is made possible by 813 supporters over at mainenginecutoff.com that includes 40 executive producers thank you to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob Tim Dodd, the Everday Astronaut, Frank Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hay Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris,

Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. You make this kind of show possible. And if you like what I'm doing here, head over to managingcutoff.com slash support and be my boss because this is my full-time job now. It is made possible by people like you. And if you want to help support the show and get access to Miko headlines which is an entire other podcast that i do every single week for the paid members there i run through all the stories of the week give you my thoughts on them keep you up to date on all the various goings on in space you can do that at managingcoff.com support and i thank you so much for you for that and uh for now that's all i've got for you thank you so much for listening

as always if you've got questions or thoughts hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko or on email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.