Main Engine Cut Off - T+244: Dawn Aerospace’s Rocket-Powered Mk-II Aurora Takes Flight (with Stefan Powell, CEO)

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Stefan Powell, CEO of Dawn Aerospace, joins me to talk about their big news announced today: last week, they completed three rocket-powered flights of their Mk-II Aurora spaceplane in 3 consecutive days. We talk about that achievement, what the company is up to overall, what their vision and plans are for the future, and how they’re approaching the market in a unique way.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Benjamin, Ryan, Joel, Jorge, Andrew, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Russell, Donald, Frank, Joonas, Robb, The Astrogators at SEE, Simon, Lars from Agile Space, David, Fred, Warren, Pat, Pat from KC, Moritz, Steve, Tyler, Kris, Chris, Bob, Lee, Dawn Aerospace, Theo and Violet, Jan, Matt, SmallSpark Space Systems, and four anonymous—and 828 other supporters.TopicsDawn AerospaceDawn Mk-II Aurora — Dawn AerospaceRocket-powered spaceplane takes flight — Dawn AerospaceSuccessful Rocket-Powered Flight - CEO Statement. — Dawn AerospaceCertified and Ready for Rocket-Powered Flight — Dawn AerospaceTransitioning space propulsion to a nitrous-based industry standard — Dawn AerospaceLynk selects Dawn Aerospace propulsion following an extensive industry trade study — Dawn AerospaceThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen 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 NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by SpaceX

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I've got a really fun show today. I've got Stefan Powell, the CEO of Dawn Aerospace with me to talk about the fact that they have flown the rocket-powered Mark II Aurora space plane three times in three days. It was just, I think, last week or the week before they put a press release up that said they are now ready to start flying their rocket-powered plane. They've done a bunch of flights under jet power. And then just a couple days later, they were ready to roll with this news that they did three flights in three days towards the end of March, March 29th, 30th, 31st.

So Stefan is here to talk to me about that. This is one of those rare episodes where we've got a guest that is also one of the executive producers. And if the name rings a bell to you, Don Aerospace has been an executive producer for a while now of the show. So there's, you know, I think think the se crew was on once when they were the executive producer this is the other one i guess tim dodd counts as well uh so it's always uh an interesting crossover but um it's a fun conversation i wanted to get into some of the stuff with stefan about the company overall they do a whole uh side of the company is is satellite propulsion and the other side of the company is satellite propulsion, and the other side of

the company is doing the space plane work. And he definitely answered a lot of questions I had about what they're working on, why they're working on it, what's the market like in these instances, the way that they're approaching this kind of stuff. So really cool conversation, an epic video of this flight campaign that they've put up today. All these links in the show notes, you can check them out. So it's going to be a really fun episode. But before we get into this, I do want to mention once again, just a couple weeks now, two weeks away or so from the live episodes I'll be doing at the Space Symposium out in Colorado Springs. Managingcutoff.com slash live is where you should go if you want all the details. I will continue to be adding names to the list.

The ones that I'm adding as you hear this are the full slate of the guests I'll have for Off Nominal on Wednesday afternoon, 3.30 local time out there in Colorado Springs. Off Nominal will be live at the Red Wire booth on the show floor. We will have returning guests, Lauren Grush of Bloomberg, Michael She sheets of cnbc and uh a new one that's actually been on our list for a little while uh jacqueline feldsher of payload will be there to talk with us and we're going to be covering all the stuff that's happening at space

symposium giving you our thoughts on it and having a good old off nominal time uh before that tuesday wednesday afternoon i'll be uh hosting five main engine cutoff episodes so check mainenginecutoff.com live for the timeline generally it's you know after lunch on Tuesday and lunch to all the way through 4 30 on Wednesday I'll be hanging out at the Redwire booth on the show floor they're hosting me there on a stage that they've got at the booth and all this stuff will be hitting the podcast feed after the fact. So if you're going to be out at Space Symposium, hit me up. I've already heard from a bunch of you that are going to be out there. And I owe a couple of emails back. But I'm really excited to meet everybody,

to do some live shows, and just to have an awesome time out at the conference. So that is the news. And let's get into the conversation with Stefan here. All right, Stefan, thanks for joining me on the show today. It's exciting, exciting weeks, I guess, multiple weeks for you. How's everything going down your way? Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us on the show. Yeah, things are going great, actually, remarkably well. Lots happening. well um lots happening to say the least uh y'all have been busy so um i as much as i have shouted you out every single week as executive producers uh and you're one of the rare ones that also make their way into the be the main interview for the show um i feel like we should dive into dawn

overall before we talk about the the space plane. So give us a general idea of the company, what you're up to day to day, and the kinds of projects that you've been working on. Yeah, yeah, I can do it. Give you a bit of the elevator pitch, I suppose. Yeah, Dawn, we're a space transportation company. We like to think about that in terms of going from Earth to space and from space to everywhere else. It's kind of a little bit strange almost for a

launcher company or an in-space propulsion company to try to do both, but we think it's really important to consider them both because it actually lets us come up with much more globally optimized systems. Now, we're still a long way away from these two things really having a lot of interaction, but already it kind of shapes our thinking. We know there's a lot of companies out there already doing launch or already doing in space propulsion really well. So our ideas generally aren't around being like small iterative steps, but trying to be a genuine revolution. And I know there's a lot of companies out there saying that, and some of them really

come off as kind of being a little bit like, yeah, okay, space elevators, that's cool. But, like, I'll believe it when I see it. So, you know, we have a pretty strong bias towards really doing real stuff and showing the world when we actually have something. So, yeah, we've had a pretty interesting week this week um particularly on the on the space plane side of things um you know we've been flying our um our aircraft around on jet engines we've done 47 flights on that over the past sort of 18 months but this was the first time that we had got that um airborne under rocket power now that you know it really wasn't um you know trying to shoot for space this time.

It was, it's really just about showing that the aircraft works well and that it's all handleable, controllable. You know, all the system upgrades associated with the rocket engine were, you know, that basically it could handle it and that we could rapidly reuse it. Because, you know, that's the real point of going to a space plane. You know, we're pitching for this market probably 10 years from now where you you really want huge scalability you want really good reliability it's sort of like where starship is going in lots of ways um but we just see like you know there's just massive demand coming um so much of the launch

capacity has already been bought up so this rapid reusability component is really key. So, yeah, that's kind of what we've been holding true to early on is having that rapid reusability in this already. So, you know, the first rocket-powered flights we did, we did three flights in three days, which is pretty cool. Pretty happy about that. And was that just because you needed a nap between them or what was the kind of work between each flight?

I'm curious to hear what the schedule was like from each flight. Yeah, actually, so slightly interesting story. The first flight we did, you know, there's always minor things come up when you test the first thing. You know, it's like the first product iteration. The first one's always a little bit janky. You know, like the first rocket you know it's like like the first product iteration the first one's always a little bit janky you know like the first rocket launcher usually fails um but luckily for us you know minor failures don't actually rely uh don't result in losing the whole vehicle you know that's one of

the main reasons that you go for a space plane is just this inherent robustness that aircraft have over rockets so uh yeah we actually had a propellant leak in the Ford of the engine. And so we got airborne and got it back on the ground. Nothing too untoward had happened except for that we had consumed a lot more propellant than what we had expected. But luckily, we had reserves. There is redundancy in there. But of course, we needed to fix this leak so we removed the entire engine uh the entire oxidizer tank we found the leak it was a relatively

trivial fix uh put it all back together um you know this this all happened the next morning actually and we were flying again by 4 p.m that day so yeah like what do we have to do basically half disassemble the aircraft put it back together again a real light workload yeah yeah exactly um so like the i mean the team was amazing and getting that all together and then the last day flying um you know we did a flight uh i think we had the vehicle in the air around midday um everything checked out and and ready to go again by 2 p.m. So we could have actually squeezed in another flight that day, but the weather was closing in and it was, we kind of completed all the campaign goals. You know, this was really just about showing that the vehicle worked in the most basic sense and that we got a significant amount of data for us to be able to

assess how it was going before we actually start to stretch its legs. Yeah, and maybe we can talk more about the roadmap of the space plane and figure out how this fits in overall to the strategy at Dawn because, you know, even pulling up the website, right? I have the links in the show notes. People can pull it up. You have these two primary things between satellite propulsion and space launch. And on that satellite propulsion side it really is you know tanks thrusters um systems more than vehicles and more than an orbital vehicle right like you're not you're not building your own orbital vehicle at least that's

listed publicly right now you don't have to tell me if that's something else you're working on but on the space side you're putting together the whole vehicle and you know maybe you can dive into the history of which one started first and and which one grew out of your work and why you've structured the company in that particular way yeah yeah yeah absolutely um yeah like i say you know we we think both aspects are important you have to think about space transportation as a going from earth to space and then the satellite's life itself and and eventually de-orbiting or you're going to a graveyard orbit or something so the only real way that you're going to maneuver the satellites in space is with an onboard system so you have to be a component supplier um you know so that's where the satellite propulsion piece comes from um that originally

started as a a master's thesis that I did was really about miniaturizing the rocket technology that I'd worked on. My background was in a rocket club in Delft University. We built the largest hybrid rocket engines in Europe and went and launched them from Spain, which was a blast in itself. But yeah, like we kind of saw this hole in the market of there was really no good chemical propulsion solutions, especially for small satellites. And then really, especially with CubeSats, it's just like no options. So for CubeSats, like I don't think that's a really big market, but it was the entry point. It was a group of users who were willing to take risks and try new things.

And we came up with this one new little rocket engine. Like it's tiny. It's literally like this big with a whole propulsion system, you know, propellant tanks, um, valving filters, um, the works all fitting into about a 0.7 new thing. And we flew that a few times. And I believe that was actually the first 3d printed pressure vessel in space. Um,

and it was also had like common oxidizer fuel bulkheads. It was all kinds of crazy, but yeah, we flew that, um, that flew on Vega actually in 2020. So that's, that's already like ancient history in lots of ways. But that was kind of the starting point.

We're actually seeing quite a lot of commercial traction around that now, especially in the one-Newton class. But the next thing that really took off was the 20-Newton version of that. So that's a thruster, which is architecturally identical. It also uses nitrous oxide and propylene. And that's been the main propulsion that Deorbit has used on their space tugs ever since their second one. So, you know, that's 48 thrusters in space now on,

I think it's 10 spacecraft. No, nine spacecraft. So, you know, it's pretty well established now. And you can look up the TLEs. These things have been running around in space for a good while and doing pretty significant maneuvers. And so, yeah, we feel like there's pretty good heritage now on that core technology. It really works. It's pretty simple. It's pretty simple it's pretty

um it's still very high performance you know this is um significantly better than like hydrazine monoprop not quite as good as hydrazine biprop um in terms of like raw like performance specs but um still like it it just whips the pants off it in terms of like cost, sorry, like performance per dollar, because you haven't got these huge compliance costs of dealing with hydrazine. And that was really the killer for the small sat industry. You know, you're talking about a five million dollar per satellite mission and 10 or 20 percent of that's going to go to just your compliance costs of dealing with hydrazine. Like that's just ridiculous. It's not going to fly. That's compliance costs of dealing with hydrazine. Like, that's just ridiculous. It's not going to fly. That's why people aren't using hydrazine in these small sets.

Yeah, and I think that's an interesting spot to take a quick little side note on the, like, the propellant wars, if you were to call it that. Because, you know, even the lifetime of this podcast, I feel like I've had a couple shows on and off where there's a debate about hydrazine versus like the green alternatives and and we should talk about the the whole nitrous uh thing that that was announced last week with impulse and the whole rest of them um and i feel like there's a lot of times we can get sucked into a debate of like we need to come up with one particular right answer for everybody and and then i i feel like there's more nuance there's got to be more nuance in terms of of which one is the right fit for which form factor or which use case um and i feel like there's i don't know there's something in that in there if you talk about like green propellant it's good to get some headlines about that and really push a particular storyline there about

like look at this person wearing a hazmat suit around hydrazine. And that gets played up so much versus the actual technical considerations. So I'd love to dive into that. What you just talked about there about is this the right choice for satellites in a certain class and how you see nitrous in this case working for the customers that you're looking at? Yeah, okay. So I think you can break this down a little bit. So right now, propulsion in general is just really, really expensive because it's a cottage industry. It's tiny. This is an absolutely tiny industry compared to anything that you'd call significant like agriculture or logistics or anything so it's or like auto manufacturing for example is probably more relevant it's three

people wide i have a weird space podcast and i've talked to like everyone that makes rocket engines that's pretty much accurate so you know we kind of all know each other um if you want to do anything like it but it's really really hard so the cost is just extreme like it's just it's it's damn well near extortionate because there is no other option right you know you got like you can buy it from these three people and they all charge an extreme price so scale is a real problem here so at least our starting point was, look, we've got to choose a propulsion, a propellant solution that actually works across the wide range. Now, it's not necessarily going to be optimal for any single user because it's, you know, it's not the highest ISP. It's not the highest storage density. It's not going to be as good as electric in some domains.

It's not going to be as good as electric in some domains. It's not going to be as good as hydrazine in others. For some users, that compliance cost doesn't really matter, like TOD missions, for example. They just frankly don't care. And it's not going to be as performant for going out to an asteroid type thing. But if you can appeal sufficiently to all of these users, then you can get to a scale where the cost starts dropping dramatically because you start getting out of this cottage industry and you start getting towards proper serial production. And that's really where we've set our pricing to start with. we won't make a whole lot of money off our early customers, but already we're seeing that volume just ratchet right up because everyone goes, yep, this really turns the needle for my mission. That lets me do things like not need dedicated launch anymore.

And I can use, I can use ride share. I can, you know, cut my launch costs by like at least 50%. There's a separate debate there about how much people are actually paying for rides to space but anyway they can they can make a significant saving by just having a decent onboard propulsion system and if we can offer that at a reasonable price then you start getting constellations thinking about procuring propulsion instead of designing it themselves like starlink for example they didn't procure from the open market because you know these three guys in the market they're all just too expensive and for that price you might as well just design the thing and

and build it yourself because frankly it's it's not that hard like it's hard but it's not that hard if you're building 40 000 satellites it warrants building your own system but you know we've gotten the price point down low enough now that we recently announced we're building Propulsion for Link. That's going to be a big constellation as well. And they decided that, hey, look, at the prices that we can offer it, it's no longer worth them doing that internal development. They'd rather just buy it and focus on their own problems so that's that's the real difference i don't think you can do that if you just choose one super

narrow niche you won't get the scale and you won't get that um that cost advantage that comes out of economies of scale so on the launch side of things um i have a million questions about the space plane project generally. So this one is called Mark II Aurora. How did we get here? What happened to Mark I? That's always the question. When you see a numbered thing. All right.

What are the other numbers in the series here? Yeah, yeah. Mark I was a modified Viper jet, which was a very small model aircraft, which we flew on. It was like a ducted fan to take off. We put a rocket engine on the back of that. You know, a very simple bi-propellant still. You know, that was also a nitrous propylene bi-prop engine that we flew around. And that really was like a you know pretty much a a

hobby sort of style thing where you know you stood at the end of the runway and you flew it around and you could flick a switch and turn this rocket engine on the thing would just go ballistic on you you know it was it was very hard to control with that much power um so we flew that around um before our seed funding um i have to demonstrate to people that just didn't really know that there was nothing fundamental about rockets. That meant you couldn't make them rapidly reusable. We flew that thing multiple times a day as well, but probably more than anything else just to show that these five guys

in a garage weren't idiots and that we could do something pretty cool. So that kind of got us off the ground, so in quite a literal sense. And we started building the company from there. But even back then, you know, right at the start, there were these two streams. Going into in-space propulsion was a key thing for us because it was very obvious that the problem, well, the problem is just way smaller and way easier to do something real. So way faster to get to real revenue. And now that's really the financial backbone of the company.

So, you know, also unlike other launcher companies, we're not burning cash at a horrendous rate. We're pretty much default alive now. You know, we, we still invest heavily into R and D, but if you would strip away, even half of that R and D would be pretty damn profitable. So we're not, um, you know, we're not struggling to stay alive or we haven't got some like, you know, event horizon in front of us. That means we're going to die if we don't do something. I was just going to bring that up that you, that you've done it backwards of everyone,

where everyone would start with a launch company and then go acquire somebody that's doing propulsion or space services because they need some sort of base, right? We've seen that Rocket Lab, Asterisk, clearly going through their own situation. I guess that's why Virgin Orbit is going out of business. They didn't find a propulsion company to buy and then strap that to a launch company. So you've literally done it in reverse, where you're like, like all right let's start with the one that is the revenue generator and uh you know we have other interests elsewhere but um do you think that there's something

do you bake that into your plans of of launch where like this is going to be the lost leader for a bit or do you think that there is a like like, maybe I'm jumping on your, you know, the way that you're going to roll this out here, but is there something particular about your vision for the space plane that says this can be different than the rest of the industry that's like making money on one side while they're losing money on the other? Yeah, totally. Like, I think just because of the concept we've selected, and like I say, like we're kind of pitching for something that's 10 years down the track, right? But that's just in terms of launch.

I think the thing that's really hard to predict, it's really hard to say anything with any certainty because this is an entirely new capability. You know, I think people, especially in the launch community, don't appreciate the utility of rapid reuse. And by rapid, I don't mean, you know, like once a week, I mean multiple times a day. We really start to actually apply fleet economics. Falcon 9 is just barely scratching the surface of what fleet economics means. Don't get me wrong. Using a launch vehicle 10 times or maybe they get to 20 or hopefully they get to 100, that really changes the economics.

But man, when you get to 10,000, that's really next level. So that's what we want to do. Getting stuff to space is the obvious market where where we can say look if we had this product everyone agrees uh if you could if you could do this rapidly and cheaply there you would capture the market and there's no discussion there and you can you can close a business case on that what's really hard to close the business cases on is uh we think there's a whole bunch of interesting suborbital stuff we could do there's all all kinds of microgravity research or atmospheric research or space weather research or whole sections of the atmosphere that these researchers term the ignorosphere,

because we just know so little about it, but then we know it has huge implications on like climate forecasting or climate modeling, weather forecasting. So there's probably value there, but it's kind of an untested market. No one has ever had this capability. But like, if we could fly the Mach 2 Aurora to 80 or 100k altitude, multiple times a day and gather real data there that actually changes the way weather models are built in the world how much is that worth frankly i just don't freaking know man but i don't know how you're on the math on that one yeah i would love it but but um but you know like we we we anticipate having this capability within the next sort of

18 months um so if we can commercialize that there's there's very real potential that this vehicle which is totally intended as a technology demonstrator for us as a company before we go and build the real deal mark three you know two stage to orbit um vehicle um maybe we really can actually commercialize the mark two and then our entire you know pay for that entire pre-development if you like yeah so that's that's a really interesting uh thing to dig into of uh that this isn't maybe you thought this was going to be like a tech development not to say dead end but tech development you know cul-de-sac we're like we had to start here to work out some of the stuff working out and then we'll move on and you're like well we will move on but also maybe we keep flying this

thing um so to this point you've you've done like you mentioned a ton of flights with the jet you've done these three with the the rocket um did you fly a similar flight profile as to the flights that you've done previously or were you you know pushing into new areas yet with the rocket powered flight yeah so so like our tech dev strategy strategy is that you always want to have overlap between these different configurations. So even the jets, it had a certain performance envelope. And then the Mark IIA is the first version of the rocket-powered aircraft. We actually made sure that the engine has low enough capacity, oh sorry, low enough thrust and we could fill up the tanks like they had enough

capacity that we could weigh it all down, that the accelerations would be roughly the same as the best that the jets could do. So you know the first flight we did was flying in this mono propellant mode because it's a peroxide engine you can just run it on monoprop at like 50ish percent throttle at half efficiency so you know we're talking like this rocket engine's at like 25 percent of nominal biprop thrust it's barely on but you know it still rips the aircraft into the air about as fast as the the jet engines did at full thrust but that meant we could fly like a like an almost identical profile to the last flights that we did on jets so the last like four flights that we did on jets was just put it at the end of the runway just go full thrust as fast as you can to 6 000 feet cut the engines and come and glide home and that's

almost exactly what we did on the rocket engines. And then, you know, from there, we're just, the third flight we did was then actually a biprop takeoff. So that was, you know, the full acceleration rates. But once again, like we'd loaded the vehicle down as much as we could. We're kind of inching towards this realistic flight scenario. But if you can do it in such a way where it overlaps with your previous configuration,

the delta risk is actually really small. Like, yeah, it's a totally new engine, but it's the same flight profile. The BIPROP takeoff, is that the one in the video? Yeah. I've mentioned in email that half of this conversation is going to be you convincing me that all this is real because between the landscape of New Zealand and what this flight looked like, it all looks like CG, even that it just is totally awesome looking.

So I was I was pumped on watching that. So you've you've do those flights that covers that. I guess I should post an album art of you doing the tech dev overlap hands that you're doing on screen here. So did these three flights cover the ground where the rocket is kind of dipping into that jet engine performance and you're ready to go above that now? Or what's the next step for this particular airframe?

Yeah, exactly. The rocket engine performance did, like I say, exactly the same flight as what the maximum performance for the jet engines could do. And once we had shown that that works, we can start extending out. So there's also a bit of a story there with the regulator. Because this is certified as an aircraft, which is a major, major departure from traditional ways of doing this, where you have segregated airspace. You fly as a rocket, as an assumed thing to basically blow up at any point. Because we fly as an aircraft,

we are certified by the Civil Aviation Authority as opposed to a space agency. But that means we do need to build trust with them. So they're kind of innovating with us. So there are some limits on our current certification. That means we can't fly to space just yet under this current certification. We have to prove that the vehicle is capable, that we're capable of operating it, that it's safe enough, et cetera. And then we get an extension to our certification to be able to fly higher and faster. So that's part of the real difficulty of trying to do something that's genuinely different. Like this really is different even in that legal domain. It's not just technologically different. This is completely different certification.

So we have to push them on that too, which is challenging, but it then has massive reward as well that once we have this piece of paper, we can just go fly as much as we want. We're not waiting around for the regulator from that point on. We've got a license to go fly from this airport as much as we want got a license to go fly from this airport as much as we want provided we stay within the confines of the certification interesting um yeah i imagine a lot of that is like uh you emailing an office and i'm going oh i don't know who's supposed to answer that question so it kind of pings around a while and you're not getting clear answers because nobody's tried to ask them that question before

i assume that's part of it oh absolutely yeah so we have to have a super close relationship with them um that's part of the great thing of being in new zealand as well you know this agency is not thousands of people it's tens of people so it's pretty easy to have personal relationships with them and actually really discuss on a like have really productive conversations about how are we going to do this in a in a reasonable way so the plane to this point is um remotely operated uh from the ground it looks like it's all manually driven is that is that accurate yep yep so um like once again for um certification reasons it's a it's a remotely piloted vehicle so but just like any other aircraft it has pretty extreme capabilities in terms of like pilot assist so there's everything

from you know modes to be able to handle wind gusts and you know dampen all that stuff out to autonomous flight modes where it can in theory take off and land by itself just like you know a 787 can fly entire missions by itself but you know it's it's still pilot in the loop there for legal reasons there has to be a pilot sitting there that could take over at any time but um particularly in the case of like anomalies like if you if you completely lost connection to the aircraft it doesn't just fall out of the sky it can it can start doing an autonomous program, like it can automatically abort the mission, go into a

loiter pattern, try to loiter where you would likely be able to regain connection until a pilot can regain control of the aircraft, or it'll be programmed to ditch somewhere where you know it's safe. So these sorts of autonomous capabilities give you a lot more robustness, and then even if all of those fail, it still gives you a lot more safety. You know, the chances of injuring someone on the ground are really low because it can just ditch itself in a controlled manner still. So that's one area where it's obviously going to be hugely important as you get higher and faster, and it sounds like there will be a different airframe that's getting you up to

80 100 kilometers but you know your your roadmap has atmospheric heating on it at some point and you know and when you get to a sufficiently high uh speed you're going to lose contact with the plane so um do you have are there particular plans for that in works or is that more like we will, we will get as autonomous as we need when we need it. And we'll just like focus on the part of the tech tree that we're on at this point. No, we, like we, we already build out all of that autonomous capability already. So that was like a big part of the flying around on jets was proving that that all works because that's, it's most critical through glide phases.

So that's where, you know, there is no difference between a jet and a rocket. So yeah, that's all pretty well fleshed out at this point. Like the vehicle does already fly autonomously and it's very capable in doing so. But yeah, like whether we're going to lose contact with the vehicle on re-entry, I'm not sure that's a given because the the re-entry speeds are actually quite modest it's much more akin to

like spaceship two um no i meant like your you know mark three when you're when you're going orbital or something like that yeah so yeah okay so so but even then the first stage which is you know the the winged uh remotely piloted vehicle that'll still top out at only like Mach three and a half, maybe four, you know, jury's still out on exactly how fast that'll be. The second stage will be a much more traditional expendable second stage at this point. Okay, so this is more similar to some of the concepts that were out there around the DARPA program that never went anywhere, XS1 or something like that. That was a space plane that gets you most of the way up and then a second stage to take the other half of the delta V out of the orbit regime. Yeah, exactly. We'd love to talk reusable second stages at some point. I don't, like it certainly helps the business case, but by far the lion's share of the gains

are to be made in that first stage. And once again, this actually tees in really well with the other side of the business that is actually getting really good at just building propulsion systems, like smallish propulsion systems at scale. We think we can get the cost of those down pretty well and produce them in a factory-like manner that it's really not that big a deal, especially if you treat them as an entirely

separate payload. It's something that you just take up to high altitude, kind of kick out the door and it does its thing, goes off to space. The real key for us is the rapid reusability of that first stage. If you can operate that bit, which will be about 96% of the hardware, if you can operate that rapidly and in an airline-like model where your costs are roughly half fuel, half everything else, then you've cut nearly 98% out of your first stage costs. That's a lot. That's where the real savings are to be made.

So the technical distance that you have between where you're at now, and I'd love to hear some detail on, you mentioned this is the Mark IIa, but it sounds like there's going to be another one that takes you you higher faster that kind of thing and then up to three um do you feel like the the technical distance between where you're at and mark three is greater or less than what you've already covered i think it's fair to say it's still greater um but in saying that um um i i don't i don't think it's going to be that insurmountable. I think the hardest bit is actually just getting people to believe that this is a real thing.

I think there's, especially in new space, there's been this real chasm between these two groups that are like the space elevators, the absolutely crazy pants stuff that people just flat out don't believe. And at some point I feel like even SpaceX trying to land rockets was in that camp. And it was only once Starhopper came around. Sorry, not Starhopper, the hopper came around that they actually started landing them and people go, Oh shit. Yeah. Like this is really doable. But I i think spin launch may have also even been in that camp of like

look this is just a little bit crazy no one really well some people did kind of believe it and and space planes are kind of in that camp as well like so many people have tried to do space planes right like xs1 um x34 um it's this is not a new idea but to that to that point though i think the ones that are are the wild ones are this single plane is going to take off from this runway and be orbital and go to the space station and come back home too so i think you know between mark 3 or xs1 those are more like okay like i get that that seems like a plausible concept of operations and it's a flyback reusable first stage like that's that's different than i don't know i'm gonna hop in this plane and fly to the space station without ever having another thing attached to me like those are different classes but but you're right

like plane in in a non-space shuttle way gets completely I'm sure the first time that I saw Don airspace, I was like, ah, a space plane thing. I'm 100% sure that was my like, scrolling through Twitter vibe, right? Because of that exact unfair thing that gets applied by the to the term in these days. yeah yeah exactly so like you know we get that from everything from isn't this just air launch to uh the space shuttle also wasn't uh economic and which is like completely opposite ends of the spectrum totally different this is again back to like the how do we all argue about what one technical thing has to rule them all it's like yeah if you scrub away all nuance yes they both have wings exactly but that's about where the commonality stops. So, yeah, so like I think a big part of the problem is actually just socializing this or getting this idea to be socially acceptable and accepted in investment spheres as well. That like, look, this is a legit idea. There is real utility.

You can do it at scale. This is not a harebrained scheme. And we're already seeing real utility at the subscale. So I'm a firm believer that if we can actually commercialize the Mark II A and show that, like, look, we're doing something so genuinely different that we've actually opened up a complete new market it's you know maybe relatively small payloads and everything but you know then building the mark 3 is probably not just about getting stuff to space it's a hey look

this is also a one-ton capacity to um to suborbital space actually there's all this utility that people didn't realize exists in suborbital space. You know, what does five minutes of microgravity do for things like in-space manufacturing? Can you manufacture something in that microgravity? If you've got these huge payloads, do I actually have to go all the way to low Earth orbit to do lots of these otherwise in-space industries? to do lots of these otherwise in space industries. I think that's just entirely unexplored,

but if we can actually complete the mission of, of the Mark two program, which is to get to space twice in a day and to be the first literally thing ever to, to do that, you know, we we've never even gotten so much as an Apple or, you know, anything above the commonmen line twice in

a day if we can be the first to do that i think that will speak to the legitimacy of the concept and and us as a company to be the ones to actually push this through and then we can get some real momentum behind the project yeah and you did um just looking at the the landscape of people that have talked about you know frequent access to space I guess and then to key off what you're talking about payloads, I mean we've seen Blue Origins

flying experiment only payloads on New Shepard today, right? That was the one they had the in-flight abort with so clearly even though they have the human version ready to go, they're still making time on their manifest for a payload only flight. So, you know, there is a market there that comes in their case with the cost of everything else that the human spaceflight component comes with. So, you know, in the Mark II case, can you trim out enough of those operations that it becomes much more economical for you? And there's a bigger market there because of the fact

that this is a thing built to do this really well right rather than trying to be all things to all people the other aspect that you mentioned is is being able to do this every day to fly and put something into orbit every day so many companies have come and said like we're gonna do dale i think astro is probably the most recent one not to knock on them twice in an episode but like we're gonna do daily launches starting you know everyone's pitch deck is three years from now we're gonna do daily launches and it's like no you're not you're not gonna do daily launches in three years because even spacex is not and that's both technically in that particular manifest but payload wise we don't know if

there's enough payloads to fly every single day yet because no one is even close to being able to fly every single day yet so at some point between now and forever the future, is there going to be stuff going to space every day? It would feel silly to say no. Like we're only going to go to space once a week max. That's a ridiculous thing to say. So the benefit is you are getting down the technological road of being able to fly frequently enough to do such a thing that then you can, you're basically like, I don't know,

you're not going out and selling payloads for everyday flights and then going, okay, now we've got to figure out how to fly every day. You have a market in mind which requires you to fly frequently and a goal which requires you to fly frequently enough, and you can market that and develop it and sell the market as you go, which I think is much in the way that you've gotten the order right between a space services company and a launch company. I feel like that is a more appropriate order for this kind of offering.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. The way that we think about this is that we're building an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with the reusability of an aircraft. So lots of companies have started with that, you know, the perfect performance, something that actually gets something to space. And now they're trying to retrofit reusability or high cadence or like high manufacturability or like something,

some way of making that, yeah, like fly every day or every week or whatever. We really wanted that high cadence in testing as well. And that's why we started with an aircraft and we continually increased the performance. So I hope that also makes it somewhat more believable that when we have this thing actually working, it will actually do it every day. And that's maybe not even so much because the market is there but

just because of the the economics that it lends like lends you to so even if we weren't flying it to space every day because there just wasn't the market for it it's the fact that you're still going to use a single vehicle to do you do more than a thousand flights just completely changes the economics of it. That's actually fine if you only did 50 flights a year with that vehicle, because you'd be operating that one vehicle for like 20 years. That'd be already a massive step change in the economics. But yeah, like I say, I think there's just going to be a ton of other uses for these things anyway. So give us an idea of what's to come, you know, where's Mark II going, Mark IIa, and what is that next step on the hardware side as well?

Yeah, so obviously notoriously hard to predict anything with any sort of certainty in R&D world. And I, I'd like to stress, we really are pushing the boat out on quite a few things, like even the certification side, it's, it's super hard to be able to predict that. But anyway,

and see also the fact that you posted your press release, we're ready for rocket powered flights. And then a week later, we're like, by the way, we just did three in a day stretch. That was really quick. That was really quick between those two press releases.

Sometimes we wait two weeks for weather, especially for a flight like this where, in theory, actually we can handle really quite extreme weather. But you don't want to do that on your first flights. Like, come on. We'll wait for a good weather window. But a good weather window showed up and we were ready, so we went and flew.

But yeah, the Mark IIA we think will be able to get to about 20 kilometers altitude. But, you know, this is a really quite overbuilt aircraft. It's reconfigurable for jets. It doesn't have basic optimizations. Like, it doesn't have tanks in the wings. So it's pretty limited in the amount of propellant it can take. But for a very like boilerplate aircraft, it's still pretty capable. It's actually still pretty interesting. And even that might even be like commercializable. But we think we'll be able to get to about 20 kilometers altitude with

that. We should be doing that before the end of the year, is certainly the plan. And the Mark 2B is already under construction. We hope to be flying, doing first checkout flights with that by the end of the year. And then sometime in 2024, we'll be getting much closer to that, you know, completing that mission of flying to space twice in a day. So the Mark 2B obviously has, you know, it's way more optimized. It's not going to be able to take jet engines, for example. The structure is much more optimal. It has wing box tanks. It has about 30 or 40% more fuel on board.

It has RCS systems on board to be able to handle, you know, flight outside of the atmosphere, all that good stuff. So, yeah, that'll be really interesting when we start flying that up, you know, really, really high and start having to do things like, you know, solve the reentry problem. That's certainly a bit of an unknown for now, exactly what that's going to look like for us. But it'll be an amazing learning platform for us and should let us iteratively approach these problems um and then you know

rapidly learn so is that going to be the same basic size and shape as the mark 2a or is it and it's just these new components or is it physically bigger as well no it's it looks identical like same aerodynamic shape. So that's, that's nice. Cause then all of our aerodynamic data from these early flight campaigns all carries over perfectly. The only other upgrade is the,

the engine's getting a thrust upgrade of about 30% as well. And then Mark three is, is bigger, much bigger itself. And is that something that you'll, you kind of have on the drawing board now and then you're going to circle back once you get through the Mark IIB work?

Yeah, like it's a parametric design for now. Basically, you put in the payload amount and it spits out the vehicle design. And that ideal payload is something that's always changing. If you had asked us three years ago, I think we would have said the ideal payload is something that's always changing you know if you had asked us three years ago i think we would have said the ideal payload is probably about 150 kilograms if you ask me now it's probably more like 250 300 i think what we have on our website is for

250 kilograms but it seems to be creeping up like what people are actually building it's continually creeping up um but we um thankfully we actually have a really good handle on that market from our propulsion system side of the business. You know, we're actively building systems for like more than 15 customers. So we actually know what people are building, where the demand is, what's going to make sense in terms of a launch vehicle as well. So when we actually get to a point of having to lock in a design for that mark three we'll we'll tune that payload class to be what we think um makes sense but for now it's just a bit

of a like putting something real out there yes if it was a 250 kilogram payload i think it'd be like a 25 ish ton um like maximum takeoff weight vehicle um The second stage is, you know, somewhat north of a ton. Yeah, so that's kind of the indicative suborbital payload, if you like. Yeah, I appreciate you guys that are like, yeah, I mean, that's the shape of it for now. But we're here and there's a lot to learn before then. Like you said, there's a whole reentry question coming up. So that's awesome i'm excited to follow along and i'm really happy that um we got the chat today and i think

this is actually the first uh hey we have an embargoed uh conversation to have podcast i don't think i've ever had a podcast synced up with some news coming out so that's uh really exciting as well oh great first we'll take it everyone loves a good superlative in the space industry for sure so yeah we try to back it up with some some real stuff as well though you mentioned that at the beginning that you like to talk about stuff after you've done it i'm like what are they putting the water down there in new zealand that the uh space companies from new zealand are like uh we'll get to the talking later we got stuff to do it seems to be the the way that y'all operate down there,

and I dig it. Yeah, I do. I think it's part of the culture. Whenever we go off to the States, especially in the early days when we were super green, I mean, we're still pretty green now, but we always got told, you know, like this Kiwi humbleness, like, can that?

That doesn't work in the States. Like, come on, start wearing your, you know, your heart on your sleeve type thing. But no, it's like, come on, start wearing your heart on your sleeve type thing. But no, it's still, there's just so much smoke and mirrors out there. And I really just don't want to be caught up in that. You know, I want to be perceived as a legit company because we have stuff in space. We work with other legit space companies. and it's important that these space planes don't get conflated with the ideas that frankly are cool but are just not really it.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Well, that works with my brain, so I like that a lot. So thanks again for hanging out, and I've got a bunch of links in the show notes people can check out, videos and everything that they have of the flights. So we'll be following along a lot, but thanks again. Yeah, thanks, Andy'll be following along a lot, but thanks again. Yeah. Thanks. It's been great.

Thanks again to Stefan for hanging out with us and answering a lot of questions about what they're working on. That's really cool to hear their approach to talk about the mindset behind the decisions. Um, and definitely clarified, you know, as I mentioned to him,

I, I think I almost certainly just scrolled past, uh, Dawn airspace the first time it came across my feed. And it was good to like, kind of sync up with where they're at now, all these years on, and the way that they're approaching it in comparison to a lot of the competitors that we talked about there and the way that they've approached that in the past. And I've really appreciated the openness and honesty there. So very, very cool.

And before we get out of here, on the topic of Don Aerospace, Donald, Pat from KC, Joel, Theo and Violet, Chris, David, SmallSpark Space Systems, Matt, Fred, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonot, Rob, Bob, Pat, Frank, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this possible. And everyone else over at MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. All of you supporting the show is why I'm able to get amazing guests, head out to Space Symposium to do a bunch of live shows, and just continue to grow the show, do bigger and better things. Thank you all so much for making this stuff possible. This really is all thanks to you.

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