Main Engine Cut Off - T+270: K2 Space (with Neel Kunjur, Co-Founder and CTO)

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Neel Kunjur, Co-Founder and CTO of K2 Space, joins me to talk about their vision for the future of satellites and the wider space industry, what they’ve been up to lately, and what their roadmap to the launch pad looks like from here.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—David, Pat from KC, Joonas, Josh from Impulse Space, Will and Lars from Agile Space, The Astrogators at SEE, Bob, Benjamin, Russell, SmallSpark Space Systems, Theo and Violet, Matt, Ryan, Warren, Brandon, Steve, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Fred, Tyler, Joel, Jan, Stealth Julian, Harrison, Frank, Kris, Donald, Lee Hopkins, Better Every Day Studios, Pat, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, and four anonymous—and 823 other supporters.TopicsK2 Space | Developing large satellites for a post-Starship futureEpisode 120 - Big Dumb Satellites - Off-NominalStartup K2 Space raises $50 million to build monster satellitesThe 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 Intuitive MachinesWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I've got a really fun guest with me today. I've got one half of K2 Space co-founding crew, Neil Conjure with me. He is the CTO there. We had his brother Karan on off Nominal a couple of months back talking about K2 Space, but we're going to check in with neil today talking about what's been going on since that conversation and dive into the technical details uh some of the trades that they're making on their vehicles where they're targeting uh their vehicles being used in the space industry and really their vision for what the next couple years of space entail and the way that they want to make an effect on the industry overall, and some of the missions that become possible when they change

the economics of what's going on in space. So a really fun conversation, really enlightening, and a company that I'm really excited to follow along with as they make their way to space. So without further ado, let's give Neil a call. Neil, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I finally got both Ks on my collective podcast sphere, so welcome aboard. Thanks for having me. I know you were saving me for the more technically oriented one, but I'm sure you had fun with my brother. Well, hold on. I didn't decide that. You and your brother sorted that out. That's true. We flipped a coin so yeah yeah uh it's yeah so i should mention up front if people have not heard quran on off nominal this was uh i guess maybe last spring uh or summer it was after we met

space symposium so it was a couple months back at this point and it was a really fun conversation talking about k2 overall and and some of the mindset behind it but it's been a little bit of time since that so people should go watch that show. You hit pause, come back when you're done. So maybe you can give us a little bit of overview for those that haven't heard that, what K2 is and anything that's been going on in the last few months. I know there's been some fundraising happening and some team growth, so it'd be cool to catch up with what's been going on. Yeah, you know, come to think of it, I don't think there's been a more relevant day to give an overview on K2 as the morning of a good Starship launch. I mean, it's pretty exciting.

So, you know, K2 space is built on that future that really Starship is ushering, what we believe is a mass abundant future. You know, I've worked on spacecraft for my entire, pretty much my entire career, aircraft as well, both very mass constrained vehicles. And those mass constraints have kind of manifested in every single spacecraft that's ever been put in space. We at K2 believe that we need to design spacecraft differently to prepare for that world of mass abundance and really leverage the benefits that we're already seeing with Falcon 9 and the future benefits that we see from Starship. So what that manifests as is, you know, instead of going smaller, you know, to go cheaper and move faster, which a lot of the market has been doing over the last five

to 10 years, we believe that there is space in the market and somebody needs to start thinking bigger. So we're focused on higher power satellite buses. And just to get a quick definitional, I'm sure most of your audience already knows this already, but most spacecraft are comprised of the satellite bus and the payload. The satellite bus is generally somewhat mission agnostic. It has all the power, it has all the propulsion, the structure for the payload to complete its mission. That's what we're focused on. We're focused on building really high power satellite buses for a world, you know, with Falcon 9 and Starship. And so when I say high power, I'll qualify that with actual specifics. So most small satellites that are being developed today by most of the new space companies come in well under five kilowatts of array power,

most are around one to two kilowatts of power. Our smallest platform, the megaclass satellite bus is a 20 kilowatt satellite. And we have an even larger platform for Starship in the future called the gigaclass, which is a 100 kilowatt class satellite bus. So just a complete different category of spacecraft that we're focused on. And the reason why we're doing this is because we believe that fundamentally, almost all applications in space are limited in some way by a combination of mass, power, or aperture, right? So to give you an example, RF telecommunications, power, and aperture limited. For optical imaging, generally mass and aperture limited. And we want to develop platforms that just completely knock down any price constraints to accessing

those three things in high quantities. And yeah, so that's a brief overview of what we're doing, our product, and I can delve more in any detail in any way you want to go. That last bit is really interesting and was exactly where I wanted to start was to talk about the technical trades that you guys made when you're thinking in this way. And maybe this is a bit origin story, but how did you arrive at those being the trio of things that you're focused on? Because, you know, the other angle, knowing where you two come from makes a lot of sense of, hey, Starship's going to be flying soon. No one's building payloads for this thing yet. What could we do with that environment when the economic model changes? But then,

you know, probably your job was to match that up with the technical trades that actually make sense for targeted payload classes or mission types. So were there ones that you left off the drawing board there, or was it pretty obvious from the start that those are the three? Yeah, I mean, for us, you can look at the space market, right, and look at where the majority of, I would say, commercial activity is, of national security activity is, and look at those applications. The applications that make up the biggest part of the pie are the ones that are power and aperture limited for the most part, right? Telecommunications, I think, still accounts for over 75% of kind of the market share for a lot of the commercial activity in space. And so it kind of made sense from a business perspective to focus're directly affecting a customer's bottom line, right? So for example, a telecommunications customer that cares about the cost of landed

capacity, right, the dollar per gigabit per second, that is directly related to the dollar per watt of the satellite, right? So you start thinking along those lines of where are the areas where I can build a business that is, you know, going to be affecting a customer's bottom line, and you end up with that optimization around those three core variables. Now, you know, that the origin story wasn't all dollars and cents, right? I think Karan, you know, on Off Nominal kind of gave you a little bit of an inside info on kind of why we started the company. Where we started was really in science. You know, we talk a lot about the commercial and national security side of our business, but there is a core science part of our business. And there, you know, we built this business that we can help affect science missions. And it

really started with the decadal survey where we read the latest planetary science decadal survey, and all of the spacecraft kind of proposed in that decadal survey are not small satellites. They're all very capable spacecraft that need a lot of propulsion capability, a lot of mass, a lot of power. And when we looked at the market, we just didn't see anybody really building new spacecraft that could directly affect those missions. So that was the origin. And then we, you know, kind of along the way, we realized that, hey, by affecting those three metrics, we're also really building a successful commercial and defense product as well. Yeah, that's definitely the, you've got the special sauce there, right? That's a lot of the successful companies that we see in the market today have the thing they're

interested in and the thing they're focused on and the things that enable that, that are close benefits. And SpaceX, the obvious example, right? Rocket Lab, certainly among them wanting to fly some missions to Venus, and they've got missions that are going to go to Mars or the moon that are similar to payload buses. So that's always the, you know, if you can get that function correct, right, where you're able to find useful ways to use your product, but still achieve the thing that you're started out on, that's, I'm not sure there's a better success metric than that. Now, you also have to balance that against industry trends and be aware of like where things are shifting.

balance that against industry trends and be aware of like where things are shifting and it'd be cool to get your insight on the current state of observation and communications probably both where everybody's really into constellations these days um there's good and bad to that right you've seen amazon needs to launch so many thousands of satellites over the next two years they're buying every available launch vehicle. So those architectures certainly impose business constraints overall because you need to have enough cash flow to fund that many launches to be able to launch that many satellites. And it's not purely a how much does this satellite cost. It's a wider picture than that.

So in this era where big satellites are not very much in vogue, you know, Viasat's got a couple of monsters that are flying. Not very many others that are getting funded these days in terms of, you know, comparing to a couple years ago with big geo satellites. And then the constellation side is huge, mostly Starlink, but others are certainly there. So how do you see those trends playing out? And where do you feel like you can thread the needle for convincing people that a big, very powerful satellite is the right fit for their architecture? Yeah, I think the way you have to do it is by not forcing them to choose, right? Historically, you've had to choose between constellations or high power satellites. What we want to do is we

want constellations of high power satellites. And, you know, we talked about industry trends, one of the industry trends that, you know, I was very much in the loop on, and one of the things that shaped a lot of our thinking, we were told early on that we were a contrarian bat, right? We were going higher power to larger platforms while the market was going smaller. And in reality, that actually wasn't true. If you look at the Starlink progression, it's a great example of this. Starlink V1 was a 300 kilo satellite that was roughly four to six kilowatts of array power. V2 Mini, which they're flying right now, they may rebrand it just as V2, is probably around a 12 kilowatt satellite, roughly 800 kilos of mass.

And V3, which they want to fly with Starship, is going to be a multi-ton spacecraft, over 30 kilowatts of array power, right? So you're seeing this happen. Kuiper was a larger platform than Starlink v1. OneWeb Gen 2 is larger than OneWeb Gen 1. And so those fundamental constraints that I mentioned on power and aperture are actually driving the market in the direction that we're already headed. And so you can even go smaller than that, too. Everyone used to launch one U or three U CubeSats. And now it's like a six or 12. It seems to be a thing that people are interested in these days. So, you know, once you start getting up there in the U's, it's like a 6 or 12. It seems to be a thing that people are interested in these days. So, you know, once you start getting up there in the use, it's like, all right, are we still doing this CubeSat thing? Are we just doing small satellites now? And then once you're small satellites, are we still doing small satellites?

I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Are we doing 200 kilo platforms? Are we doing 500 kilo platforms? Like, what is the definition of a small sat now? It constantly changes. And so I think the key for our positioning is you have to be able to deliver at the price point that enables constellations, and you have to have the kind of launch vehicle

integration that enables constellations. And so, you know, when we originally started the company, we were pretty focused on the Giga class, 100 kilowatt satellite just for Starship. But we realized there's actually a tremendous opportunity for deploying high power constellations just with Falcon 9. So the mega class that I mentioned, it's a 20 kilowatt satellite, but you can still stack 10 of them inside of a single Falcon 9, right? So that's deploying 200 kilowatts of useful power per launch, which to our knowledge is the highest of any satellite manufacturer that's not SpaceX, right? Starlink gets up there, hard to compete with them. But, you know, we're kind of focused on a different platform for different orbits. But that kind of, you know, multi-manifest capability coupled with the price point that we're trying to hit now makes it possible for customers to not have to choose.

Right. They can have constellations and they can have high power per satellite and really make their bottom line business case close. Right. In terms of the capex and the cost for, you know, landed capacity, as we as we mentioned before. The dynamic that I'm seeing changing and an interesting point of discussion to talk about now is what do those constellations look like, right? Where are they? Are they the Starlink style constellations? Are they another type of constellation? And I think one of the things a lot of our customers

and a lot of the operators are beginning to realize is that it is really hard to replicate the Starlink approach if you don't own the launch vehicle or don't have Jeff Bezos' sheer force of will to make it happen. The two most extreme outliers in our modern tech world, yes. Exactly, exactly. If it's not one of those two things, it's really hard to replicate the super dense constellations of low-Leo satellites

to really hit the price point unit economics that you need. And so some of our customers are looking at, okay, I still want to deploy constellations, but I want to do it in a way that maybe plays to my strengths, you know, doesn't require me to purchase 20, 30 launches, right? And I can deploy my constellation quicker. And so that's where we're seeing a demand for higher orbit constellations, right? When I say higher orbit, I don't just mean geo, which is traditionally where your mind would go when you think about a 20 kilowatt platform. We're talking about high Leo, Mio and geo. Right. And eventually in the future, cislunar space, hopefully.

And so that's where we're designing our platform for is really for the constellations that we want to deploy anywhere above a thousand kilometers. That's that's been what we've been optimizing the platform for. And certainly the Starlink and the lower orbit constellations, latency is a big thing that they tout as, you know, that's why we want to be this low. But then the other aspect is latency is certainly the driver, but then there's the capacity constraint of those individual satellite buses as well. If you're able to go a couple hundred kilometers higher, latency is not that much worse if you're doing most typical applications, but you can drive much more capability through fewer satellites. That's a flywheel to some extent, because like you're

saying, if you're able to launch a stack of these on a Falcon 9, you don't need to launch as many, you know, you could actually get in on the manifest between all the Starlink missions and Kuiper missions that are going to fly over the next five years. So it's a funny balancing act where certainly there are applications in the world that need the lowest latency possible and always will. Um, but you know, is there a broad enough swath of use cases that need good, you know, low latency, but not that low. And you're still able to get there with capability that, that it benefits you in other ways as well.

Cause the space that you have on, on one of your buses in comparison to a typical constellation constellation satellite i assume you're able to kind of rig out the payloads to have either you know more beams that would be available to drive more capacity either you know more defined in one area or over a larger area from a higher orbit it gets really complex really quick but i think it's cool that that you're kind of seeing these options emerge as viable paths for different businesses. And we've seen it, you know, OneWeb's O3B constellation is around 1,000 kilometers. I forget exactly where that sits. Yeah. Somewhere in that range.

OneWeb's constellation, yeah, it's somewhere above 1,000. OneWeb's is, but O3B is like MEO, right? O3B is around 8,000 kilometers. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah. And they've got like, I think maybe 20 satellites or a little bit over 20 total. So that's a good equivalent. But then again, right, that's looking back to the previous generation of building these satellites out and how much the unit cost was of those.

And even the launch of those, they could only do maybe two satellites per launch. I think it was about two when they were launching them. I'm just like randomly pulling things out of the stretches of my memory at this point. But I'm trying to just look at, you know, what has happened over the last 10 years and figure out where your kind of idea slots in. You mentioned a handful of these markets, but are there specific payloads as well that you're trying to design for? And whether that's like an actual specific payload or general types of certain sizes and scales? Yeah, yeah.

So we try to be as flexible as possible. We have, you know, if you're trying to maximize packing density inside of a Falcon 9, you tend to be driven towards more platform factor payloads. So when we're deploying high power telecommunications constellations, a lot of those payloads have some phased array component,

right, with optical inter-satellite links. That is kind of the state of the art right now that a lot of the operators are looking at deploying in these next generation constellations. But we have the ability with the same platform to basically accommodate also higher profile payloads. So things like optical sensors or imagers for both kind of classical Earth observation, as well as some of the national security applications for remote sensing as well. And we want our platform to be able to accommodate those as well. One of the interesting things from a design perspective is traditionally, when you look at the satellite bus market, you have some satellite buses that are optimized for remote sensing applications and some that are optimized for high power telecommunications. There's not really one bus that spans all those things. Classic example, like Ball Aerospace's platforms

are really well suited for optical imaging, but they don't really develop satellite buses for telecommunications. Whereas Lockheed and Northrop, they've optimized for some of the telecommunications platforms, maybe less optimized for some of the optical payloads. And what we found is that if you remove

the mask constraints, right, that force you to make that fork in the road decision, the one-way door, you can actually start to develop systems that are over spec that can support both of those applications, which allows us to drive down NRE. And look, we know every satellite is going to have unique aspects to it, right? We're not saying it's 100% the same satellite. But the goal is you keep the unique mission aspects to 20% of the satellite that you have to design. You keep the unique mission aspects to 20% of the satellite that you have to design. Maybe the interfaces need to change or some aspects of the thermal design, but not the whole core satellite platforms, right?

The core bus systems can stay relatively the same for each mission. And one point I want to circle back on, just because you were talking about the MEO constellations and what's changed, right? Traditionally, when you're looking at a MEO constellation and you're trying to plug plug in the CapEx, you know, required to deploy that satellite, say that's a 20 satellite constellation in MEO, because of the MEO environment, right, high radiation environment, where you need high power, you're almost plugging in a geo satellite bus cost 20 times into that MEO constellation model, and your CapEx just blows up, right? And so what we're saying is, hey, we should actually reopen the book on some of those things because we can change that number

instead of it being $150 million satellite, right? What if it was a 15? How would that change the dynamics of being able to deploy these? And what if we had a different way of even getting to Mio? One of the things we haven't talked yet about is our propulsion system and really how that opens up the upper orbits. But we're designing our system so that we can maximize the number of satellites we launch into LEO and then orbit rays from there to all the other destinations that our customers want to go. Let's talk about it then. Tell me, give me the details. What do you got? Is this an internal project or is this something that you're partnering with Propulsion for? Yeah, so this is an internal project. It's really driven by a need to find a propulsion system that

complements the high power platform, right? So we have a 20 kilowatt satellite bus. And in the future, we want to have 100 kilowatt satellite bus, right? And so when we looked at the propulsion options that were out there today, specifically on the electric propulsion side, which you tend to devise towards if you're trying to maximize your power fraction per satellite rather than propellant fraction per satellite, We didn't really see good options. We saw a lot of low power thrusters in the 500 watt to one kilowatt regime being made now. But as you scale that up, the availability drops off quite quickly.

And so, you know, as a case of finding the right person for the job and having that need, you know, our head of propulsion is Rafael Martinez, who designed the Starlink hall thrusters, designed Apollo Fusions hall thrusters, and was the right person to try and approach the problem that we wanted to solve, which is a very, very high power hall thruster. So it's a 20 kilowatt hall thruster. It's four times higher power than any system that's flown to date. I think the highest power flown is like a four and a half kilowatt hall thruster right now. And what that enables is the efficiency of electric propulsion, right, in terms of ISP, which allows us to maximize the amount of mass allocated to power,

the useful parts for our mission, but without sacrificing quite as much thrust. So it's still low thrust, right? We're not talking about chemical propulsion thrust here, but it allows us to reduce the transfer time, say, from going from LEO to MEO by a drastic amount, which actually is mission enabling. I'm going off on a tangent here, but many people don't know this, but most people don't do low thrust transfers from LEO to MEO. It really hasn't been done before because you spend so much time in the inner Van Allen belt if you're doing low thrust propulsion. If you're doing a nine month to one year orbit raise, you fry your satellite bus with radiation and you're non-functional when you get there. With this propulsion system, that all changes. So we can maximize the number of satellites dropped off in LEO,

orbit raise to MEO from there. And that has really opened up a whole new set of mission sets for MEO for a lot of our customers that really haven't been possible before. That is really interesting. And on the thruster end of things, I think the Lunar Gateway is only a 12 kilowatt system or something like that, that they're developing before that is really interesting and the on the thruster end of things i think the lunar gateway is only a 12 kilowatt system or something like that that they're developing for that as well so and that you know is like the upper bound of what's on contract right now so that's pretty wild to consider that you know you make probably another business line heading up there if you want to add on to the lunar gateway you've got plenty of mass to do that um yeah we we have a

goal to get our thruster up there before that one gets up there just to yeah yeah reset the the highest power hall thruster even higher than i think what's been previously done so yeah that's awesome and and certainly you know that's you're talking about the transit times from leo out to meo but if you were to launch half a stack or something like that and falcon nine they could probably put you up more elliptical and cut that even further. So I'm sure, you know, at that point, then you're like, well, see, extra launch costs worth it per satellite. But again, it's just, you know, the idea that you have here of providing these options and letting people trade what is right for them and their businesses, what you need to do to survive in an industry that's changing as much as it is at the moment. Yeah, and it's even more relevant when you think about, I mean, the news of today, right?

The Starship launch. Starships are reusable upper stage, right? What that means is it has amazing performance to LEO, but until you add refueling to the equation, its performance to the upper orbits is quite a bit worse. So ideally what you want for the near term until refueling gets fully rolled out and fully phased out is you want to be able to huck a lot of mass into LEO and then move around from there. So our thesis in that regard is that we can just put as many of our satellites in the Starship as possible, drop them off in LEO, disperse from there to go to the other orbits that we want to go.

It's also a similar, I would say, theory of companies like Impulse that are developing orbital tugs. I think it's a good bet, right? Refueling is definitely on the Starship roadmap. And it's something that will kind of reset the rocket equation in orbit, for sure. But in terms of when that will be available, how it will be available, it's also important to kind of plan for all possible paths that we could take with Starship, where right now it's being really well optimized for Starlink payloads, which is really going to Leo, right? So that's where the focus will be for the near term. Yeah, I mean, the payload door is the Pez dispenser door, as they called it today. So, you know, you're gonna have to wait for them to get the real door on there before

one of your satellites is floating out. So you mentioned the propulsion side of things is in house. How do you think about components elsewhere in the vehicle? Are you taking an approach to bring as much in-house right off the bat? Or is it something where you've got, you know, certain key things like propulsion that you want in-house and you'll get to the other ones somewhere down the line? Yeah, we have a pretty structured way of approaching the kind of make versus buy trade. Obviously, a lot of us come from SpaceX, so we're very biased towards vertical integration in general. But what we try to think about is, one, does this component even exist out there on the market? If it doesn't, then we have no choice but to make it ourselves, right? That's the case for kind of the electric propulsion system that we wanted. The second case that a lot of our components fall

into is they exist, but they're super expensive or the supply chain is extremely limited. One of the reasons why building a spacecraft of our class is so hard is because I can't just go to the new space companies and buy a reaction wheel or buy a power system to use for this class of spacecraft. You're really going into the older, I would say, supply chain, like the Honeywells of the world that develop reaction wheels to try and find these components.

And those are, just based on the way that they were developed, pretty high cost. So those components are components that we chose to do in-house ourselves. We're doing our own reaction wheels. We're doing a lot of our own power systems and actuators in that regard. And then the final class of components that we choose to vertically integrate are things where we can make our speed of execution significantly better by bringing this in-house. So the example I like to use there is the computing platform. While we could go maybe purchase a compute platform like a flight computer from a third party, that wouldn't be too hideously expensive. We really want to have our hardware development really closely coupled with our software development. It allows our software

teams to execute really fast, develop really innovative new software if we control the hardware that it runs on. And so that's the final case of kind of vertical integration that we make. But total, we're probably at about 80% of the satellite is vertically integrated. The 20% that's left are things that have been relatively commoditized, or we can get fairly cheaply, or things that don't really scale with size, right? So sensors, radios, exactly. Yeah, those things we're happy to buy for the near term. And just like SpaceX, we may find opportunities to vertically integrate those over time, but it's not a near term priority. It makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I mean, putting it out in a system like that, you're like, yeah, that's obviously the way that you should handle this sort of situation. It is funny that you're

in that world where you have to just figure out, has anyone made a thing for this size of satellite? Because, you know, it's just an interesting environment to get into. You know, there was talk a couple of years ago, I haven't really heard much about this since, that Hughes or somebody was partnering with Blue Origin or building a special antenna that would go on New Glenn, not partnering with them. Not a lot of talk that way lately,

but I feel like there was an initial enthusiasm to, let's build components for giant satellites, and then it fizzled out because no one was building the giant satellites. And so no one was going to build the components for the giant satellites, a little bit chicken or egg. And I guess you're just like, we'll do the chicken and the egg at the same time. Yeah. And look, we have people asking us now, you know, coming and seeing our reaction wheels, we've developed some of the components we've developed and, you know, asked to buy them, right? Because we're somewhat building this new supply chain in-house. And what we generally say is that's not our focus right now. We don't really want to be a

components business. It's nice that people have an interest in those products, but we have enough on our plate just using our own components for our own satellite products first before we think about kind of opening them up to the rest of the market. Let's finish off talking about roadmap from here. I'm curious to hear the kind of timelines that you're working with, the team size that you're at now, where you're going, and then also if you've got any plans in the works of you're going to fly a couple of payloads on your own to test these things out in space,

or are you going right to customer payloads off the bat? Yeah, so we have a pretty staged approach, which allows us to have many iteration opportunities. In terms of people, we just crossed, you know, 36 people, mostly engineering. Actually, yesterday, we had someone sign their offer. I'd say out of that, you know, 32 to 33 are engineers, right? So we've gone very engineering heavy from the start to develop all these components. And a lot of what we're doing this year is taking those components and putting them in our first in-space mission.

So that'll be kind of some of the components that I mentioned before. We haven't announced exactly who we're partnering with for that or when we're doing it. So I'll keep the details there fairly high level. But we will have our first mission in space this year. building in-house, as well as our ability to kind of bring the team together to execute on a hard, you know, a complex mission with both the software and the hardware interacting and the operations involved in doing that. So huge step for us as a company, it'll be a huge maturation point. And all of that's looking towards kind of the full, you know, launch of the first full megaclass satellite, what we're calling the first operational mission. That actually will have

customer payloads. You know, we have a few primary customers that we're working with right now to scope their payloads and integrate them onto that platform. And then, you know, could potentially have some of our own technology development kind of components as well to demonstrate things for future missions.

That will launch. And again, we'll announce the timing and the partner for that launch as well at a later date. But that'll be launch ready, you know, by the end of next year. So that's the target that we're all working towards. And this year is a lot of the component development starting to bring those together into integrated systems. So that first mission, is that your mission that you're staying in control of and you're hosting payloads? Or is this someone buying the satellite from you directly?

Yeah, so this is one that we'll operate. We will host a variety of payloads for a variety of customers, really because we want to get our own operational experience. And a lot of the payloads for that mission have fairly simple requirements. Really, they want data as a result of these experiments, most of them experimental payloads. And so for us, it's a relatively simple mission for us to operate. In the future, though, I think what my for us to operate in the future though i think what my what my brother likes to say on the business side is we want to be in the business of selling multiple satellites to one customer not one satellite to multiple customers we'll

continue to do this kind of model where we're hosting payloads for certain demonstration launches but really with an eye towards demonstrating a capability that we want to scale up to constellation scale fairly quickly right yeah yeah like if you've got a couple of customer payloads going up and it's just a lot available, then send something up to test out the next iteration or something like that. And that's, you know, when you're talking about unit costs down as low as you are,

like that becomes inherently possible where that was never really in the cards in other instances. So it's interesting to think more of, you know, satellite bus development in a way that really hasn't been done before. You know, maybe there's a here or there, there's a demo mission that somebody flies because it's a big new line or something. But that rarely happens, even with we're going to integrate this new component, a new thruster on board, kind of just goes up on the next customer satellite. And then a year later, there's four of your customers that have had the same thruster issue in geo and you're, you know, scrambling to resolve that. So, you know, cribbing some of the methodology that the launch vehicles

have taken in the last 5-10 years, and bringing that to the spacecraft side is unique and a huge benefit to the path that you're choosing. Yeah, it's kind of crazy to me that, you know, the first time you're ever testing some of these payloads and these components is when you deploy a constellation of them, right? That's what the kind of older way of doing things was used to, because the cost was so high, you couldn't afford to just do a demonstration satellite or just do a demonstration capability. So you had to go straight for the real thing and deploy your satellite in or deploy your constellation in MEO from the start without ever having tested those things before in space. And so we see it as an opportunity to kind of remove some of that risk off the table

and say, hey, not only are you de-risking some aspects of your payload that you want to deploy at a constellation scale, you're also de-risking the integration, right? You're learning how we operate as a company, how we can integrate those payloads and those functions and getting a trial run of us before you kind of put in your constellation buy.

Looking forward, you know, there's on the defense side, there's a bunch of activity on the Space Development Agency right now where they're buying tranches of satellites from a whole bunch of different vendors. Pretty much you name a satellite vendor, and there's a couple payloads heading up for the Space Development Agency. Are those the kinds of programs that you feel K2 has a spot in? I'm not sure on the specifics of like after launch, when those satellites get transferred over

to operated by Space Development Agency, but even in the commissioning phase, there's certain constraints that would put upon K2's operations. I'm not sure if that's something you'd be interested in or you would rather sell the buses to Lockheed Martin or somebody who's the prime on that sort of program. Yeah, the approach we've taken is we're

flexible, right? There's certain mission sets where we're operating as a subcontractor to a prime that's going to take, you know, our platform, integrate it with their system, launch it and operate it. There's others where the customer wants us to operate it, right? Much like the first mission where we're operating a mission with hosted payloads. And so we're developing the tools and the operational systems to allow for both. Our preference generally is we would love to own more of the integration and more of the operation ourselves to the extent that the customer will allow us because it allows us to really deliver a better optimized product, right? An end-to-end service that is really quite tailored for the customer needs.

But we're flexible, right? So if we have a national security customer that absolutely wants the keys to be handed over, as you were saying, that's something that we can readily support. And it helps also that we can, just by our model of us owning the satellite bus and satellite platform, decouple some of the payload operations from the platform operations. So the types of operational things that we need to be able to do are obviously orbit raising, activation, attitude control, those kinds of things. But some of that can be relatively decoupled from maybe the payload operations where you're really operating a network service or a

communication service out of a separate control center. And so we have models for both that we've been looking at. And we like to be pretty flexible for our customer needs. But just along those lines, I would love to own more where we want, you know, where our customers allow us to. There's so many interesting things to consider. Like, i'm sure there's people at the nro offices that are like wow that's a that's a pretty big base for these huge antennas they fly today you know some of these diagrams that they have like the orion uh antennas that are like 100 meters across or something are wild and we don't really have that much info on that sort of stuff but there's like a whole new world between starship new glen and and stuff that you're building it's like you know minds can go wild

with what's possible in terms of the actual scale of things in space um so yeah really interesting stuff i was there anything i left out of this list that you feel like i should have asked about that i missed um let's see i think we covered uh covered some pretty good ground. And we didn't talk as much about the science aspect. But one really interesting thing that actually, you know, was one of the first concepts we looked at talking about what's possible is just the idea of what this will do for astrophysics. I think there's a lot of astrophysicists out there that are really excited about Starship. There's a lot of internal battles going on right now in the astrophysics community about do we do another kind of James Webb style approach to some of these telescopes? Do we do something simpler,

maybe with a larger monolithic mirror that can fit inside of the Starship payload bay? Like really what we want to do is insert ourselves into those debates and just say, hey, we're building this satellite bus. We're building this capability. Here's what's now possible. Insert that into your trade studies, right? And let's see what we come up with. And so a lot of the conversations, both on the national security side and the science side, are really just getting in the room and showing our customers what's possible, and then showing that we're already well on our way to executing against what we promised. Because we do have a lot of promises, right? We say we can do a lot of really impressive things, but we need to execute against that plan. And so far, we have pretty much to a T executed against the schedule we first laid

out, you know, when we first briefed our first customers on this. So all pretty exciting stuff. Yeah, your background is doesn't look like a fake zoom background. And it's much more legit than some of the backgrounds I've talked to on this show. So props on that. There's sometimes where it's like, that's a pretty empty looking thing behind you. But there's like scribbles on your board and actual hardware behind you. So it's seems like things are going well. Um, facility wise, we talked about this. I think maybe this, you were just moving in when, when we had Karan on the show, but, um, what's the situation out there? Yeah. So we're in a 15,000 square foot manufacturing facility right now, or we're doing most of the first article development, right. Developing the R and

D for those components. Um, but we're actively looking at kind of moving into around 175,000 square foot facility in Q4 of this year, still located in the same general area. We're in Torrance in LA right now. But that facility will really open up the ability to scale manufacturing, right? When we talk about constellation scale, we need to start building the production line so that we can go from building one of these, you know, over the course of the next year to large quantities to support some of the demand that we're seeing from the market. And that'll be Q4 of this year. We'll move in there and get set up and start building kind of out the manufacturing line. And one comment just on hardware development, I remember in one of your podcasts, I remember hearing how you sometimes visit

some of the factories and you love to see cases where you're tripping over hardware. So I want to host you out to the factory because I think you'll be tripping over reaction wheels with how many we've built so far. That's my favorite thing, man. I specialize in vibe checks when I visit a company. So actually, I've joked on Off Nominal last week

that we should be hireable for purely a vibe check, that somebody in management can hire us to just walk around the facility for a day and give a vibe report because I will say I've had a pretty good track record of that, so I would love to come out and do that. I'll test run this service with you when I fly out there. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot

of deep tech investors that would pay you a lot of money for that. I know. Vibe checks, man. Vibe checks as diligence. Yes. Vibe checks as a service. So yeah, anyone listening, hit me up for that. Neil, this has been awesome. I just love to follow along with what you guys are working on. So it's cool to be able

to check in. Hopefully we can keep doing it as you make your way to the launch pad. But thanks again for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always happy to come back on and chat more about big high power satellites. Thanks happy to come back on and chat more about big high-power satellites. Thanks again to Neil for coming on the show and for everyone at K2 Space for being super friendly and setting this up and always being a good time to chat with. This episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by all the supporters over at

mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 855 of you or something. Patreon really changed the way that you can see these numbers. So I actually have little idea of what is actually going on there because everything's out of sync, but it's something north of 850, somewhere less than 900. I would like that to be over 900. So we need a couple of you to jump on board. This episode itself was produced by 35 executive producers. Thank you to David, Pat from KC, Eunice, Josh from Impulse Space, Will and Lars from Agile Space, The Astrogators at SCE benjamin russell small spark space systems theo and violet matt ryan warren brandon steve tim dodd the everyday astronaut

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