Main Engine Cut Off - T+261: Agile Space (with CEO Chris Pearson and Chief Engineer Lars Osborne)

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Chris Pearson (CEO) and Lars Osborne (Chief Engineer) of Agile Space join me to talk about what they’re working on, how the company has gotten to where it is today, and what’s in store for the future.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Pat from KC, Chris, Benjamin, Pat, Jan, Joonas, The Astrogators at SEE, Tyler, Dawn Aerospace, Bob, Fred, Joel, Donald, Frank, Lee, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Matt, Stealth Julian, Russell, Brandon, SmallSpark Space Systems, Kris, Harrison, David, Ryan, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Steve, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Warren, and four anonymous—and 835 other supporters.TopicsAgile Space IndustriesChris Pearson takes the reins at Agile Space Industries - SpaceNewsAgile raises $13 million to expand production - SpaceNewsAgile Qualifies a Thruster for Lunar Landings - PayloadThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by Stoke SpaceWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and today we're joined by Agile Space Industries, a propulsion provider based in Colorado. We'll be joined by Chris Pearson, the CEO, and Lars Osborn, chief engineer and one of the co-founders of Agile. And certainly you hear about Agile Space Industries every show because Will and Lars are executive producers. I think I mentioned this when talking with them, but Lars is one of the first people I knew listening to this show. So they've gone way back, way before Lars' time at Agile. But it's been a while since I've wanted to have them on to talk about everything they're working on. They're involved in a couple of the lunar lander missions coming up. Uh, you'll hear talk about that and what they're providing there.

Um, they provide a whole array of products in the market in terms of propulsion. Also have, uh, quite a big testing facility that they, uh, they use internally, but there's some history there. Manufacturing arm, the company out near me here in Pennsylvania. Um, so they've, they're involved in a lot of interesting stuff and I feel like they There's some history there. Manufacturing arm of the company out near me here in Pennsylvania. So they're involved in a lot of interesting stuff, and I feel like they sit at a very interesting spot in the market. So, you know, we're going to talk everything from the strategy on how they approach the market to the actual hardware that they're working with and the approaches that they have there. And, you know, overall what they're looking to be providing the market in the future. So wide ranging conversation,

a lot of fun to talk with them and hope you enjoy. Chris and Lars, welcome to Managing Cutoff. It's great to have you both here from opposite ends of Colorado. I think Chris, you're in the Eastern, well, Central to Eastern part, Eastern part of where most people care about. I'm in Boulder. Nice to meet you. That's usually like where we start thinking about Colorado. So not to shame all the other people used to that, but you know, just tends to be where you fly in and start your journey. And then you head out all the way West to Durango where Lars is sitting today.

How's it going? Yep. I'm sitting in the middle of the mountains here on the Western slopes. That's good stuff. People will know for sure agile space because you're in the executive producer segment forever i think lars is the first or second person i knew that listened to this show way back when i was the first or second person i encountered that had ever heard my voice

in this context so uh come in full circle 262 episodes later but um i want to start with some of the bigger picture stuff at agile um because i'm not sure you know if people might be familiar with one part of the company but not really everything that's going on over there so chris could you give us a rundown on you know what the company's working on overall maybe some of the history of how it's gotten to this point and the things that you're interested in in the near future here yeah yeah well first off thanks for having us, Anthony. This is a bit of an honor.

I've listened to the show a bunch over the years, so it's fun. Not quite as long as Lars, I have to say, I've not been involved in, but yeah, this is great to be here, so thank you. So yeah, Agile is a leading innovator

of chemical propulsion for space. And we have two thrusts that we're really, really trying to drive, developing and delivering solutions to our customers that are higher performing and faster than anybody else. So I've been with the company for only about a year now. I joined in January, and it has been a wild, wild ride. But the company's been around a lot longer.

I've been lucky enough to be involved in a couple of other space startups before, and you tend to develop the technology, and then the technology turns into a product, and you kind of commercialize it. The Agile story is kind of different, and it's really what's helped us differentiate. The company actually began life doing test services. So a lot of chemical propulsion work for a missile defense agency, some of the big primes, a little bit of NASA work down in Durango. That got the company going, allowed us to really get a solid test infrastructure in place, which is still there today. We have two pretty industry-leading test stands down there that we're very proud of.

The company really began developing all this expertise in testing and handling propellant. That set us up really well for our other co-founder, along with Lars, really realized that metal additive manufacturing was at a point you could take advantage of for chemical propulsion. down the road from from you Anthony we bought a metal AM firm called Tronics 3D that is now actually part of of Agile that produces just about all of our of our parts in-house so that allows us to move quickly but it also enabled us to really use some design features that had not been used before for chem prop and that's what's really pushed performance so you you kind of fast forward when I've been involved and really our secret source is that AM and the test that allows us to just design, build, test and iterate like fast than anybody else. It's pretty phenomenal. I've worked for Primes, I've done spacecraft stuff,

I've operated Prop and typically that product's got an 18 to 24-month lead time. We've gone from a fresh sheet of paper to being on hot fire within weeks. It's pretty revolutionary. So yeah, that's what I'm trying to do is try and grow the company and scale the company, get all that new technology and innovation to market so we can take advantage of the performance but do it quickly for our customers. The test stand side of things is really interesting because it's it's a side of the industry that you know people deeply within the industry like yourselves know about but you know i i tend to hear things from people that are

talking about did you hear this thing's going on out there and this thing's going on out there and there was recently in the last several years a real bottleneck in terms of test stands available in the country here um and the issues that that's created for different players across the industry, that doesn't really come out publicly. Like if you go to a conference, get into the right party, you can hear people talking about it, but it's not something that like is being reported in a lot of places. So if we could dig in a little about the test facility itself and the kind of stuff that that offers and how it fits into the overall market, the fact that there is even is a market for test facilities. I'd love to just dig into that a little bit, you know, since you guys are so familiar with that situation. Sure thing, Anthony.

So our founder, Doughty Barnes, he worked at Rocketdyne in L.A., and there he was supporting the space shuttle program on the main combustion chamber and then doing propulsion tests for the hypergolic thrusters there and became an expert in hypergolic testing. And one of the ways in which the company got started is that he really wanted to live in Durango. He found himself visiting the mountains all the time. So he decided to move out to Durango, figure out a way to make it work. So he started a test stand company and built this incredible test stand capability. So when I joined the company in 2019, there had already been a decade of development and investment into the hypergolic propellant handling, the test stand operations, the data acquisition system, and everything that made our test stand really capable. And it was, at that point, the only modern hypergolic propeller test stand because the previous ones were developed during the apollo era so to have something new that we could put our engines on that has really fast data response rates that has really good access to the test article

it's been an incredible opportunity for us. And they're just rare. They're rare pieces of infrastructure. They're the sort of things that, like, the U.S. government funded once, you know, during the Apollo program, and then sort of, like, never again. And then a lot of them that do exist in government facilities may have languished in the interim. So is your facility something that someone out there developing an engine of their own or testing an integration of some other subsystem could come in and and use as a service or is it

are you drifting more in like a kind of exclusive direction the more that you're getting down your your tech tree overall i'll tell you that one i think, I mean, historically the firm, the firm was all services. So there was no hardware or kind of product sales until really 2020 is when, is when we began to make the shift. So it was a hundred percent up to that point outside used basically. You flip it today and I don't think any of our revenue this year is from outside sales. I think last year it was maybe 5% or something. It's really flipped. So I'm sure Lars is going to talk more about this, but we've developed like a batch of different thrusters

for different customers, different sizes, different propellants. And basically that's using the entirety at the moment of what we have in terms of facilities. We get a lot of calls. We get a lot of calls. We get a lot of calls. And it's not just from private companies that are trying to develop. It's also from the government themselves that want to use it. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more later about scaling the business.

But that's one area we're really looking hard at is we've done so well on the product side of the company. There's been a huge amount of growth. When we were still doing the services, I think our revenues were about 120K in 2020. It'll be 12 million this year and that's all on product. So it's a huge amount of growth. But because we've been running so fast on that side of the business, it's still a question to be answered there of if we could do more on the service side. There are some interesting models where we can team with other bigger companies and also with the government.

We're able to get these test facilities up and running a bit quicker. We've just done a big upgrade this summer. So there's a question there of if we even have a kind of hybrid where it's kind of semi-owned by some folks. So it's an interesting time, but we're working through it. You know, the kind of concentration has been on the product side, which is really driven business. But yeah, I'm of concentration has been on the product side, which is really driven, which is really driven business.

But yeah, I'm not giving up on services by any means. It's funny that there's a lot of companies that are like growing up in space and start out with one thing as a service and they end up developing their technology in a way that they eat all of their capability. You know, like look at

how many launches for SpaceX this year have been starlink and it's like well we're just going to use every available launch vehicle and occasionally we'll do a customer launch but like pretty much their own you know their own internal launch service at this point um which was always part of the plan and it's why the the economics turned out for starlink but um in the same vein you know you saw the value in this test stand early on and you're like all right well we got this like let's make use of it and develop all this different technology and actually have the run of the place. But you got there through this service mindset,

which, like Lars is saying, like that definitely benefited the capabilities that you had to take advantage of when building out your own stuff. So it is a cool interplay between those, but then, you know, how you get to the decision points of which things catch on and what you're going with, that's the fun stuff probably from Chris's angle. It's incredible to have that test capability in-house. It's not literally in the same building, but it is a three-minute drive from where we are. We're sort of located at an airport

and then the other side of the runway is where our test facility is. And we also have the test engineers directly integrated with our propulsion development teams. So the test engineering and the design engineering and manufacturing engineering

is all co-located right there, which means that we can move really quickly on spinning iterations and getting into test uh and learning things from testing as fast as possible let's talk about the engines themselves you've got a huge range of of products you're working on um lars can you give us the rundown and and the way to think about the matrix of products that you're working on these days? Yeah. Um, so the ones that we, you know, can talk about, there's some, there's some that we won't be able to talk about today in detail, um, has, has been really mission focused and customer focused on what our customers need. Um, essentially when, when we were starting the company, um, we found that we did not need to try too hard to like establish product tiers and put them out onto the market and

then hope that people buy them. Um, there was demand there, uh, especially from lunar lander teams to, to tell us exactly what they needed in order to make their missions work. And then we could execute on those. So what we have is really an evolution of what the market needs directly rather than us pushing things out there. So one of the products I definitely want to talk about is the A110 thruster. That's what I'm chief engineer for.

is the A110 thruster. That's what I'm chief engineer for. So that's a 25-pound attitude control thruster that uses M20 fuel and MON-3 propellant. And that's being used as an attitude control thruster on the Griffin lunar lander mission that'll have the Viper

rover on it. That'll take that to the south pole of the moon. It'll also be used on the first US-based Draper slash ice space mission um it's it's really exciting engine um it is the first uh american rocket engine for landing on the moon that's been qualified since apollo um so we are we are leading the charge on the like development and the qualification of these so we can go back to the moon in a sustainable way and support the Artemis program. You are so close to the line, Lars.

You're so close. Yes. Saving the line. Yep. Yep. American rocket engines with American landers landing on an American moon. engines of american landers landing on an american moon um the i i believe there's a really funny moment that i remember from iac 2019 when uh you guys had was it the a110 that you had in the case uh walking around the conference in dc no that would have that would have been before the a110

okay well smaller thruster such a good story that I need to tell it regardless. I forget if you did. Somebody handed this engine in a case to Buzz Aldrin, who opened it up, gloriously looked at this engine, and said, thanks. And it's like, assuming that, like, obviously if you've given Buzz Aldrin a rocket engine, this is a gift for Buzz Aldrin to put on the shelf. Somebody had to sheepishly go and say, it might have been Julian that had to manage this situation,

and say, actually, I need to take that with me. I'm going to need that back, yeah. But that one was about the size, you could fit it on your lap. In terms of scale, A110 is around that range or physically, how big should we be thinking for that? It's 25 pounds thrust. It's about 10 inches long, weighs 360 grams. Someone printed out the qualification report after we were done with it. That weighed three times more than the thruster.

And one of the focuses for that thruster was to keep the weight down and to keep the performance high. So catalog says 305.5 seconds. When I look at a fleet average in vacuum, it's probably around 310 for what we're getting, achieving. And we compare that to other thrusters that did exist. The combination of the weight savings and the performance improvement means that a, a large lander, um, could be saving like 40 kilograms to the surface of the moon. So in terms of increased payload, increased revenue for our customers, that's a huge, huge increase in value compared to what currently existed. And that's why a company like agile needs to exist um otherwise those those commercial lunar dreams and um you know high performance

missions don't really work can you talk about the propulsion choices um on the a110 but but elsewhere across the line um and maybe some of the you know there's a whole list of engines in development on the site um there's a range of propellants mentioned there so you know this is me prompting you with green propellant go give me your rant because i've been told many times i need to get somebody like lars on here to rant about uh propellant choices for these types of engines sure um so there's a lot there's a lot of propellants out there um and usually you can expect that propulsion engineers have strong opinions about propellants and and that is the case but i gotta tell you that is there is nothing compared to the people that make spacecraft, to the people that launch the spacecraft, and the people who operate those spacecraft,

especially the organizations that have a lot of experience operating spacecraft for long periods of time. They definitely have opinions, and we listen to the opinions of our customers, and we are delivering what they need for that. the opinions of our customers and we we are delivering what they need for that um so for for many organizations many missions um you know hydrazine and nto are absolutely the best choice for their mission um so they can have uh storability for long periods of time on orbit they can have high performance um etc for you know the the so-called green propellants um i think we all know that green is a misnomer it's a catch-all for everything that is essentially not hydrazine um but but when you like look at each one you know maybe on on each category it's

not necessarily going to be like uh entirely non-toxic or not necessarily going to be entirely environmentally friendly um and each one of those will have like specific cases in which it shines in which it gets used um just just as it does for any other propellant that that's always the thing that i feel is left out is like the discussion around picking the right tool for the right job versus needing to find like the the one true way to make a rocket engine uh that's just it's not that simple there's there's a lot more a lot of additional considerations you need to make in the way that it fits in an architecture overall um i mean even even the case like you look at intuitive machines about to head off to the moon

for their first lander and one of the gating elements was we need to be able to fuel methane on our vehicle uh so there was a whole leg of this that was you know luckily spacex has desires to put methane facilities uh near and in their launch areas, which certainly helped Intuit machines get there. But that would have been, you know, with any other provider, a whole situation to really work through. And that's, that comes, you know, that's a trade off that they're making for the vehicle. And there's 1000 different things like that when you're designing systems overall.

So it is interesting to see all the choices being made. Do you feel, Chris, like when you look at customers that you're going after in the market, as Lars was talking about, there's a lot of these early customers that had influence um with these influence these decisions that have influenced the early days of a product to then translate that into conversations about future products or um you know really technical decisions that your customer is going to have to make for their own vehicle yeah yeah i think um i think i'll answer that from like a like a different perspective it tends the barrier we've we've had or the you know the step we've had to kind of climb has been more on the kind of credibility side i'd describe it as technically um you know larsa described these kind of lunar lander missions and we're on we're on two of those that really gave us a kind of bridgehead and able to show that we could actually qualify

hardware and then deliver flight hardware to our customers. And what was happening as that was going on, as we were getting some IRAD monies from some of the bigger companies, not the newer space companies, but the more traditional kind of aerospace and defense primes. And we found with that, that's been the key. Once we started to deliver the hardware, once we developed a kind of working relationship with the customers, they would design that product into their spacecraft. So I think a lot of that is kind of being there really. I think with the traditional aerospace

and defense suppliers, they have the infrastructure, the experience to use some of the more traditional propellants that we kind of go with. I think the other comment I say is, is we, we don't tend to, we don't tend to compete as much on the more commodity propulsion. So what I mean by that is a lot of the Leo missions, it's about, it's about getting up there as quickly as possible. The Delta V budgets you have to deal with, the efficiency targets aren't that challenging. The kind of customers that we're working with are dealing with problems where they're trying to close mission cases in MEO, GEO, and Cislunar, where really performance is like much more of a key. And the kind of Lunar Lander stuff is like the ultimate of that.

That really helps. When you want performance, you want real performance. There's no substitute for kind of high ISP. So we're not doing anything that's that different. A lot of the infrastructure is there. And we're finding from our customers, their concern is just you're still a very young company that's growing incredibly fast.

Can you actually deliver? They're the conversations that we're having. But yeah, I'm curious lars has to say but i think from from from my side it's driven more by the mission actually oh yeah mission is king like we we made this company because we want to enable really cool missions like landing on the moon like doing interesting things in cislitter space um just just enabling the kinds of missions that don't exist right now or the ones that are getting delayed right now because they don't have a supplier that can provide them with high-performance thrusters on a fast enough time scale.

It's been a huge differentiator for us is speed of execution and delivery of that. For many of our programs, most of them, really, we'll go from initial concept proposal to doing that first hot fire and validating that since we have the test dance in-house within a matter of weeks. that since we have the test dance in-house within a matter of weeks um so sometime between like six in eight weeks typically and even even for our our large thrusters um like we have one that's um like a little over a thousand pounds that we fired in a really quick demonstration that was that was in about eight weeks from contract start to to firing it

when when you're talking about that um are these the tests that you're doing that soon after signing on a new customer is that to kind of prove out like the duty cycle of that particular mission or is it um actual you know net new hardware that you're talking about in these cases? It could be many things. Like in one case, we needed to prove to a customer that we could, they were like, okay, you've done thrusters with MMH before, you've done thrusters with hydrazine, but can you make one with M20? So I said, let me get back to you on that. And then I got the phone, called Dowdy and said, what the hell with M20? So I said, let me get back to you on that. And then I hung up the phone, called Dowdy, and said,

what the hell is M20? In terms of M20, M20 is a mix of hydrazine and MMH. It tends to be, it's mixed in such a way, so it's 80% hydrazine, 20% MMH. And for some missions and some thrusters, that's sort of an optimal mix so you get higher performance than you would with a

more normal like MMH system which is great for engines like A2200 which is our high performance lunar landing descent engine but anyway, after that conversation we were in hot fire testing with our first

m20 thruster and the stand six weeks later um had them out for a customer demonstration they could see the thruster they could put in the sequences that they wanted to fire um and that really sealed the deal and convinced them to work with us uh that's that story should be on the website i like figuring out trying to figure out what m20 was first and then uh being like yeah that probably will work out let's run the numbers real quick um so you it sort of sounds like you know the the strategy in terms of that building the credibility like chris was talking about um with these missions with customers that you've had early relationships with. It's sort of a strategic bet that that mindset can then grow to eat other parts of the industry faster than the people that start off more on the commodity end that you mentioned, Chris,

could grow to kind of impinge on the performance-led end that you sit. Is that the way that you look at it? Or are you kind of like yeah there's there's a huge market here to address we're going to pick off a strategically important piece and something that we're passionate about and see where it goes from there it's how do you feel like that you navigate that that's it's good and you know i've i've been in the industry a while now and and a lot of this is a lot of this is i'll call it luck and relationships you know you you kind of start out and you need champions you need champions that are going to kind of believe in you and give you

an opportunity and you can do all the market analysis you want but unless you've lucky enough to build that relationship quickly and have someone who's going to trust in you you know it's a very tough place to begin um i think where agile done really, really well is we began much more on the civil side. A lot of this discussion is about lunar landers. We are talking to customers about other applications that are the more exploration kind of oriented as well. But ChemProp is used across the industry. So, you know, on the commercial side, we're doing some work for kind of last tug providers or last mile tug providers, sorry. So doing that job of getting spacecraft to their optimal orbit following tip off from the launcher. Some good commercial work.

But the one I'm most excited about actually is like on the military side. So we're seeing on there that combination of us being able to move quickly and push performance that's where that's where the real market is you know we have this sales funnel we used to opportunities and about two-thirds of them in our military um and it's all about this mixture of maneuver without regret so the air force wants to be or the dod wants to be more um able to be unpredictable to adversaries to kind of react and change mission fast um all those things require you to have high performance propulsion so it's a very good efficiency so you have a good delta v budget uh but but also you need to be able to get these technologies into the hands of the operators quickly as well and that's been the

problem with propulsion. There's not been a lot of innovation before. My opinion, Agile was the one that's part of the reason I joined this year. So, yeah, we have customers that are trying to deploy fleets of these very, very responsive kind of small sats, and that's where our technology fits really well. But coming back to your question, you know, the strategy emerges from the conversations, right? You have all these

conversations with folks and then you realize where the opportunity is. I think if you rely on market survey data and stuff from your consult, you're going to miss the point, right? So yeah, that's been our experience and I think we've done a great job in delivering for those early customers. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's still a small community, even though the industry is much bigger than when I began. There's a lot of those people are still the same. I'd be curious to get your take, Lars, on thinking about companies like Agile that supply propulsion.

It clearly works on the end of the industry the farther away you get from Earth, right? Like it's much more common to buy an engine for a lander or a spacecraft or an in-space transit bus, that kind of situation. and then the closer you get the deeper you get into the atmosphere the more that business model tends to break down or at least historically maybe not even historically but in the most recent era in the last 10 or 20 years hasn't really worked out um most of the launch companies are deeply integrated with their actual launch vehicle and their engine um almost to the point where it feels like a rule that the margins are so tight on that sort of vehicle that it doesn't really work to have you know the way that you can got a rolls-royce engine on an airplane built by whoever it's rockets aren't like that yet uh when you're talking about launch from earth but at some point you get outside the atmosphere it starts to work that way um is that something intrinsic to the problems being solved or do you feel like um it's it's

been some other business or technical decision that have led to that difference being so stark right now technically it's it's interface and scale um you know the the technical interface between a spacecraft and a thruster is going to be less complex than a uh a launch vehicle and an engine. When a spacecraft integrator is shopping for engines, they might have a thrust level in mind, but they'll be okay if it's plus or minus 25%. That will not usually break their mission. Whereas for a launch vehicle,

that's going to be incredibly performance important in how it integrates with everything. The other aspect is scale um even now when there are a lot of small launch companies before when there was a lot of small launch companies um there still weren't really that many that were in a financial position where they you know could be launching rockets on a regular basis and making them. So there's maybe half a dozen. Sorry, I don't remember exactly how many, but probably half a dozen U.S. launch companies that could be in the position of buying first-age engines.

But when it comes to spacecraft, there's dozens, hundreds of different models. It's just so interesting, right, that this market developed in that way. Because you go back, you know, into the beginnings of the space age, and I think there was an assumption that, oh, it would work just like airplanes.

Like, we'll have engine developers and we'll have launch vehicle developers and there'll be expertise in their own domain. And it kind of didn't pan out that way over the preceding, you know, 20 years or so where it shook out to be this very tightly integrated setup? I mean, I think the closer that you get to the application, because we go to space to do things in space,

and the closer you get to the application, the more unique and complex spacecraft often get. That's not necessarily the case. But you tend to end up with a lot more bespoke engineering and then also where a lot more of the value is actually created you know you look at the charts for like you know how big the space industry is and and the launch total addressable market is really a lot smaller than the spacecraft total market yeah it's like it's shocking those those pie charts that come out of how much money was made in space last year and uh you know where the real

money is in the in the industry is is always pretty stark um you did mention earlier chris the the manufacturing uh end of the the company that i think is out out near pittsburgh it's probably about as long a drive for me there as it is for you to get to where Lars is sitting right now, but a little less steep mountains out this way. We're only going over like a 1,000-foot mountain. Was the decision to go in that direction the tight manufacturing integration cycle

that you talked about, or do you feel like that is another area that could grow into services in the future, depending on how things shake out? Yeah, so on the decision, it was twofold. I mean, definitely speed. And that speed on the development side as well as the kind of delivery side.

Once you've frozen the design, you can just build faster. And the design features that we can incorporate have pushed performance, but they kind of simplify assembly as well. So my last two companies were deployable systems, big antennas and solar panels and then batteries before that. And typically, it takes a couple of weeks to assemble these parts, right? The bill of materials was just long. But once you 3D print the vast majority of it, all the complexity is actually already in that item

that comes together. It blew me away when I saw the bill of materials is like literally a dozen pieces at times and they assemble these things in an afternoon. So yeah, it's been speed and performance. Yeah, and in terms of where the company's going, it is still a young company, you know? So the test side of the business is more like 10 or 15 years old, but we've been doing product for about three or four years now. And as I mentioned at the very beginning, the services has kind of gone a little bit down the kind of focus. And I'm not sure if that's necessarily the right thing.

necessarily the right thing. Now we are beginning to grow a little bit more sustainably. It's been a crazy pace the last three years. It'll just be double this year. So it's almost manageable. But as you're kind of going through that, we're starting to see that there's a bit more of a blend of a kind of service offering in there. So there's a few things. I think on the sort of ground services and i'll call it propellant logistics we have some interesting opportunities we're not just delivering hardware now we're we're actually um buying propellant for our customers and we're doing some services over post delivery which are going to help and it just takes it takes some of the complexity and learning curve off the customer it's an obvious way we're going to go. There are some interesting kind of side markets

that we've got involved in. So we're doing work on, I'll call it, the kind of missile side of the industry as well. Some of the transportation of that hardware has a lot of crossover with what we do on the test site and what our customers do post-library on spacecraft. Don't want to give too much away on that yet, but that is actually a big, big growing part of our business.

We have some pretty major proposals in for that. The other interesting one is on the AM side. When we bought that company, it was very much to be an internal supplier for us. You know, we'd, I think, used three or four different AM firms by that point. And this particular company was was by far well in fact i think it was the only one that could actually deliver the product at the kind of quality levels we needed um but since we've been since we've been using um that capability it's been about

three or four years now through really um passive kind of bd i call it, just kind of word of mouth with our spacecraft customers. We've had folks that have come to us and asked us to produce parts for non-space industry. So we're doing some stuff for military aircraft. We have done a little bit for non-propulsion kind of space customers as well. I'm really looking to try and accelerate that side of the business,

because if we can turn that from a cost center into a profit center and really accelerate the NRE on the 3D printing and look at some even more exotic metals than we have traditionally, it's going to be great for the space side of the business too. So, yeah, it's interesting. You kind of start out as a kind of service company, you become a product one, and then you realize that actually there's an opportunity there for a blend. So I'm kind of more involved on the strategy side of things. And it's a really interesting time, actually. Make some good decisions. Yeah, you become experts in all these different areas and realize, wow, we're some of the best experts that we've got on this thing. So we might as well take advantage of that.

And you get all these inbound questions asking if you can do X, Y, or Z. And you're like, yeah, we do actually do that the best. So might as well take advantage of that. And, uh, you know, you get all these inbound questions asking if you can do X, Y, or Z. And you're like, yeah, we do actually do that the best. So might as well entertain that as an idea. It's,

it's pretty cool. I'll have to stop. I'll stop by on my way out to Pittsburgh next time. I'm heading out that direction. I think I probably drove right past and, uh, didn't pull over. So now I feel bad about it.

You're welcome. Yeah. Door's open for you, Anthony. On, on that note, I think the, I was out in Pittsburgh probably a year ago right now with Astrobotic and probably missed some of the hardware that I think schedule-wise was due to be in their facility for Griffin or something else that you guys were working on at the time. And I'm curious, as we get close, you know, we are,

it feels like we're always a couple of months away from the'm curious as as we get close you know we are feels like we're always a couple of months away from the first clips mission actually flying to the moon but this time it really does seem like we are just a couple of months away maybe in weeks if uh intuitive machines gets off in next month out of florida um knowing that you have a hand in in the griffin lander like you mentioned the ispace project as well um we've seen a lot of lunar landers go wrong in the last couple of years. And I know Lars, you've been watching all these missions.

How do you factor in those missions that have come before the ones that your hardware will be on and learn from some of those lessons? Are you doing official learning reports out of those missions to see if you can learn anything about your own product and how it relates to these missions to make the ones you're on more successful?

Yeah, so we carefully watch what are the other missions that are going to the moon, and then like what lessons they've learned, especially in propulsion, as well as what we've learned historically from missions like Apollo. And we found that's been useful for guiding some of our tests and some of our roadmap of knowing like, oh, this is this weird, interesting thing that they ran into a couple times in Apollo, like a Zot, which is like a particular thing that they found at some altitude conditions with some engines. And like,

okay, I got to make sure that we can, you know, avoid those and learn the right lessons from that. But there's also a, in the Western Hemisphere, there's definitely like, we haven't

landed on the moon since Apollo. You you know it's it's been awesome to see uh you know the indian lander i think it was chandrian three um touchdown successfully um really really nice mission really nice photos uh they should be very proud of that accomplishment but in the united states we don't like yet have a verified capability to land on the moon um so a lot of things are being like figured out now um and as we are landing making our first attempts for the eclipse mission i'm sure we'll be learning more things it's going to be pretty exciting the the rate at which i mean it it's slower than we wanted to see these missions start but it feels like once we are actually flying with these missions it's going to be a very exciting rate of things going to the moon so

um hopefully everything gets more reliable as we go um i think that market overall is in an interesting spot uh from the service provider angle um but you know when you look at the the market for these landers it feels, is that going to remain your, your focus for the next few years? Or do you feel like, you know, you'll grow into other areas quicker and, and lunar landings would be,

you know, one of the things you do, but not as a primary of focus as it is these days. Yeah, I guess I'll kind of take that. Yeah. I think, I think it's,

it's, it's a great literally moonshot, right? If the lunar economy really takes off, we're right in the middle of that. We're going to deliver the infrastructure there. We're going to help and develop that economy. We're going to rise with that tide.

But are we betting the farm on that? No. I think it might be surprising, but probably this year, two thirds of our revenue is pure commercial work. So think back to those kind of tugs. And there's some great reorders in there as well. So we actually just signed our biggest contract ever.

And that was for a follow-on order for hardware on the commercial side. That tends to be really nice sticky business. Once you have a customer there and they have a service that's got traction in the market, then you go along with that too. So that's been great. But in terms of where our focus is, at least on the BD side for kind of new business, it goes back to the military stuff I said before.

That's where we can really grow the business. goes back to the military stuff I said before. That's where we can really grow the business. Lars, on the technical side, is there something that when you look around the industry, that's probably the last question I have on my list for you. There are a lot of propulsion providers on the market. So when you're talking to somebody who's trying to understand the market overall

and make decisions around who to strike up conversations with, is there something that you feel like people skip over a lot of times that is low-key, the most important thing to be worried about? Anything that is easily missed when someone approaches the market for the first time or even the second time? Maybe they're rethinking an initial decision? Like approaching it from a customer perspective yeah just things that they you know there's obvious things to look at of performance and costs but is there is there some subset of of decisions they should be looking for or thinking about that are easily missed the first time around sure sure um i think that in general, it's one of the things that can be missed, is that unless you have a really high risk tolerance for your first mission or for multiple missions, you really want to make sure that it's going to work as it should under the mission circumstances that you need,

that you don't have like limitations on runtime for that thruster, or that you can actually verify the performance because it's great if you can say like, yeah, we'll get, you know, all this ISP, we'll deliver all these ISPs. But unless someone is able to test that in a vacuum chamber and verify what that is, you've got significant error bars on what that performance is and on how it will reliably perform in that situation too. So we hold ourselves to a high standard, and typically the kinds of missions that we are on are holding us to a very high standard.

So we need to have very good test capabilities, um, to be able to test in vacuum with a rocket engine, which is pretty hard. It's not just a vacuum pump. Um, it's, it's a lot more complex than that um you need to be able to test that engine over all of the different inlet pressure conditions that it might encounter during its mission all the different propellant uh temperature conditions that it can encounter the different dewey cycles because i i think of it like this that we we have to test um in some ways significantly more for the sorts of like high profile high performance missions like a moon lander because when you're on final descent for the moon there is no option

to like scrub recycle the count and like wait for your liquid oxygen to be at the right temperature you you have to land with the conditions that are on the spacecraft at that time yeah that's a that's a real good one one to consider that you can't just go, I will wait in orbit. We'll circle around. We'll think about some issues and we'll think about some solutions to this, but you've got a, you've got a hard deadline coming up at a certain point in the mission. So Chris, is there anything I should have asked about either the business side or

anything else fun that, that you feel like should have been a part of the conversation that I whiffed on? I don't know if you whiffed on it, but I would say Agile. You know, I just want to say how we talked about sort of technical stuff and business and how Agile's doing some really cool things on that side. But for me, I have to say one of the things

that attracted me to the company, I don't know how many firms there are in the space industry that operate out of a mountain town in the middle of colorado um or anywhere around like around the u.s that's just 100 miles away from like a like a major major urban area but it's really unique um and it is such a cool place to work i think that the people that it attracts tend to be a little bit pioneering. You either wouldn't live anywhere else or you would never live there in your lifetime. But if you're in a mountain biking, climbing, skiing, all this stuff, it's just such a fabulous place. So yeah, there's a bit of a pitch there for kind of new employees. If you've got frustrations and you want to move out and you want to live somewhere a little bit more romantic,

then come talk to us. It really is a cool place to work. We're talking about mountain bikes, but don't sleep on the road bikes. That's the home of Sepp Puth, the winner of La Vuelta. So I don't know if, Lars, I don't know if you got to the party. I know he made a big homecoming recently. Yeah, I can say that following local people on strava and drango is like really dangerous because you feel terrible don't like don't even try to place there send an application agile

delete your strava account you'll have a great time those are the two keys to success and other things about agile that are fantastic is that it is a small company and we are doing a lot of development work on different engines. I think I only talked about one, but at a large established company, they might just have like five engine products total that they've done over the course of 20 years. But we've done many more than that in a much shorter time. So we could be doing that many at the same time. There's a lot more opportunity for someone who's talented and hungry to come in and start designing injectors to try something out, to get it on the test stand, see how it does. We've done that before for programs where everyone will come up with their own injector design. And then we'll do a trial by fire on the test stand to see how it works quite literally yeah um it's a ton of fun and it's been it's been part of

our success um is is empowering engineers to to make those sorts of decisions allow them to take risks it's how we we got things like the la 144 thruster which is a which is one of the first thrusters that we ever did super high performance um hydrazine mon3 thruster that is is sort of a stage combustion engine but it's like low pressure stage combustion because it decomposes the fuel in a catalyst pack um and then it uses the oxidizer to regeneratively cool goes through a phase change in the cooling jacket and then they're injected as gas gas so we get really high performance out of that in a really small package so this little like 25 pound force thruster is able to uh get 328 seconds of isp and vacuum which is is just incredible. That was a lot of fun.

It took a long time to figure out, but we got there eventually. Yeah, is there any place that... I know you've got a lot of stuff on YouTube. Is there anywhere else that you want to point people to check out some of the actual hardware that you guys have been working on? Or any particular tests that you'd like? I know that you've got a couple like on the site i'm about to pull them up and blow out our ears on this call but uh i'll put a couple links in

the show notes we'll scroll through youtube here and figure out which ones i should put because you've got a lot on there so super cool the one there's there's one that we don't have on youtube and i don't think we will ever but i wish we could um is it is our one hour 40 minute test of the le 144 that that came at the end of the development program once we had like really tuned in the thermodynamic cycle gotten it running continuously it was just one of my one of my favorite days here um it was it was like really stressful watching it the whole time you know like being worried that like oh man what's happening like checking the thermals like every every couple of minutes watching the telemetry streams um but but it worked and we were able to in vacuum

continuously fire this this super high performance engine for 6 000 seconds or an hour and 40 minutes so it's a huge day for us that's wild that would be a long video so yeah there's probably reasons on youtube yeah i don't know if we could if we have the the right account to upload an hour or attention span honestly i'm sure it was riveting for you for me i'd like i'd like scrub for a little in the middle and then just skip to the end to see what happened to shut down that's what i do yeah it turns out not much it was it was really it was really boring uh you know for everyone else watching it yeah all right guys well thank you so much for hanging out this is awesome to chat finally have you on the show after all these years and um i've really got to get myself out to durango honestly so we will sort that one

out anytime thank you thanks again to chris and lars for joining me on the show and thanks to all of you who support main engine cutoff who make this episode possible there are 870 of you supporting at mainenginecutoff.com support including 35 executive producers who made this show possible. Thanks to Pat from KC, Chris, Benjamin, Pat, Jan, Eunice, The Astrogators at SCE, Tyler, Dawn Aerospace, Bob, Fred, Joel, Donald, Frank, Lee, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Matt, Stealth Julian, Russell, Brandon, SmallSpark Space Systems, Chris, Harrison, David, Ryan, Steve, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd, The Everdd the ever astronaut warren four anonymous executive producers and of course will and large lars from agile space uh had to tack them on the end there to uh you know give them give them the grand roll up here on the agile show so thanks again to all

of you for listening for supporting if you want to join that crew managingcutoff.com support get miko headlines in your life uh if you're three dollars a month or more and otherwise just support the show keep this thing going and keep me doing what i'm doing fully independent listener supported it's how i like to do it i think it makes a better product and i thank you all so much for their support if you've got any questions or thoughts hit me up on email anthony at managing cutoff.com on twitter at we have miko on mastodon at miko at spacey.space certainly can find us in the discord offnom.com slash Discord. The other show that I do, Off Nominal,

is live every Thursday, 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern, and comes out wherever you're listening to this in your podcast players, offnom.com, one of the best domains. So I'll plug all of that and say thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.