Main Engine Cut Off - T+284: Stoke Space (with Andy Lapsa, CEO)

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Andy Lapsa, Co-Founder and CEO of Stoke Space, joins me to talk about the company, their vision for the future, their approach to launch, the larger trends that are shaping the market, and how that all might come together in the next few years.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Steve, Fred, Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, Stealth Julian, Kris, Theo and Violet, Harrison, Matt, Josh from Impulse, Russell, Warren, Pat from KC, Ryan, Jan, Donald, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Bob, Pat, Joel, Will and Lars from Agile, David, The Astrogators at SEE, Lee, Frank, and four anonymous—and 821 other supporters.TopicsAndy Lapsa (@AndyLapsa) / XStoke Space / 100% reusable rockets / USA100% Reusability, with Andy Lapsa (Stoke Space) - PayloadStoke Space Completes First Successful Hotfire Test of Full-Flow, Staged-Combustion Engine | Stoke Space / 100% reusable rockets / USAStoke Space ignites its ambitious main engine for the first time | Ars TechnicaHow Stoke Space's Unique Rocket Works // Exclusive Tour & Interview - YouTubeStoke Space aims to build rapidly reusable rocket with a completely novel design | Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!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 ESAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I'm very excited for the show today. We've got Andy Lapsa, the CEO, co-founder of Stokes Space. They are working on a fully reusable launch vehicle and a really interesting methodology. You've got to check out what their vehicle looks like to understand that they have a regenerative heat shield with a bunch of engines arranged around it, creating an aerospike effect. There was an amazing deep dive with Tim Dodd, the every-assionaut, a year ago or so, I will say. I'll put it in the show notes for this, walking through the factory, because they started with the upper stage. They started building that out. They've got a vehicle they called Hopper, where they actually did some hop tests with this before they started

working on the first stage of the system. So a really interesting idea on how to approach this problem. And, you know, working on full reusability is certainly a thing that everyone is interested in seeing these days. So really curious approach and really smart approach. And I just enjoy what they've been working on. So I'm very excited to finally have them on the show. So without further ado, let's give Andy a call. Andy, welcome to Managing Cutoff. Thanks so much for joining me today. Hi, Anthony. Thanks for having me. I've been pretty pumped to talk to you for a while. I've been intrigued by what you're all working on. Sometimes I like to talk to people not too early on, though. There's definitely a sweet spot where I like to let everyone get their legs under themselves and get some of the initial workout. So I feel like it's a really exciting time based on what I'm seeing from the outside at Stoke. All right, we cleared the bar.

Yeah, you made it. You made it. Yeah, I was talking to John before this that there's a certain grittiness to the pictures and videos that I see of what you're working on that you don't often see at space companies. There's just a certain aspect to it that you can tell you're working on a ton and you're trying to figure out what it is that you're doing and, and you're making it work in a way that, um, I don't know, just it's, it is leaning into progress and it's something that's intrigued me about Stoke from the early days. Yeah. Well, I'd say that every test and every, um, every test has an objective,

right? You have to be very intentional about what you do. And, um, and then from there, do the minimal that you need to do in order to reach that objective and don't get distracted by other things. Right. So, uh, some of the things, like you said, are, are pretty gritty, but they're very intentional and deliberate with a clear goal and objective in mind. And, um, you know, the goal is to hit those objectives. That's one thing I want to dig in on first with you. I've listened to a bunch of interviews with you in the past or Eric Berger stories where he's come to visit y'all. One of the interesting aspects that you've talked about

is where you started. You had this great, I will tell everyone listening to pause, go listen to this show that you did with Payload and and pathfinder a week or two ago, where you talked about the fact that you started from the upper stage because you were at a point where the industry had kind of understood first stage reusability to some point, right? The current architecture that we see with SpaceX with blue origin, but that's a thing that we're kind of forming around. But the upper stage is definitely still an open and open question of what the best architecture is there. And so that's where you started. And that makes a lot of sense to me when you look at where we're at in the 2020s. But I want to

dig into a couple of the decisions that you made around that second stage and understand what the process was like to get to the shape and size of the vehicle that you started with. You know, what was the, what was the initial constraint that you gave yourself? Did you target a payload size? Did you target the actual type of return that you wanted where you're kind of space capsule-y? Like what was the initial starting point for that design? Well, maybe I'll, I'll back up because that really is the starting point. You know, we founded the company because we want to build seamless mobility to space, through space, and back from space.

And I think having all three of those modalities is crucial to build the economy in space, whether that's government use cases or commercial use cases. And I would argue that we're still figuring out the first part. We're still figuring out the two-space part. We're still figuring out the two space part. We're very bad at the through space part

and we're also really bad at the from space part, right? So we've got a long way to go. We've made a huge, as an industry, we've made a huge amount of progress in the last 10 to 15 years. And certainly companies like SpaceX are at the forefront of that. But still the state of the industry

and the state of moving goods to two, through space, and back from space just pales in comparison to any other way that we move goods and services around the world. It's like when we used wooden tall ships to sail across the ocean and move goods across the ocean. It's just very primitive. So I think once you have that worldview, you realize there's, hey, this is day one in our industry and there's a huge amount of progress to go. How do we get there? Do we have the building blocks to get there? Do we have to invent new science to do those things? And my conclusion out of that was, no, we've got building blocks.

We've got great, but we've got 50 years, 60 years of history to lean on and to build from. We just have to think about it from a fresh perspective. So that's really kind of the worldview that it took to start the company and everything else is a follow on from that. When we started, we also built cost models for launch. There's two big cost drivers of launch. One is the cost of the vehicle and it's super obvious. The other one is the cost of everything else, right? Like the factories and the test stands and the launch complexes and the army of people that it takes to run all these things.

That's all real cost, right? And if you're only launching a dozen times a year, you still have to pay for all that stuff. There's just not a lot of transactions that you can spread those costs over. So flight frequency is also extremely important. And the way that you, when you marry both of those, you get this amazing synergy, kind of this flywheel starts to spin where you have better availability because you're not production rate limited. You have, I believe, and I think the industry's starting to show it you have better reliability uh not every flight is a maiden voyage anymore um you see an amazing reliability out of

the first stage of falcon nine um second stage to their credit also but second stage is the thing that's had the last couple failures and so you know when you look at you know having multiple nines on your reliability, but every single flight is a maiden voyage, it gets really, really hard. You can't have a single lemon ever. And you're talking about SpaceX's upper stage there, but if you look at the small launch side,

everybody's been having upper stage issues from Rocket Lab to Firefly. NBL's still working on getting up to that point. And first stages, right? When every flight is a maiden voyage, it's very hard to get it right every single time. And this is a controversial, I think it's still a little bit of a controversial take. It was certainly controversial 10, 15 years ago

in the industry where people didn't trust a reused vehicle. They wanted it fresh out of the factory. And to me, it's just glaringly obvious, right? If you have the option to step foot on an airplane, would you rather get on one that's just fresh out of the factory and has never flown? Or would you rather fly on the one that's flown hundreds of times? Right?

I'm pretty sure I know my answer to that. Good for you to make that analogy too, you know? It's not, it seems a little relevant. I mean, just this week, SpaceX flew a Starlink flight on a new Falcon 9 booster. Those used to be creme de la creme, right? Those are the things that the DoD wanted or NASA wanted for a crew flight. And I think that is actually actively flipping this year, which is cool when, you know, I think some of the methodology that I find intriguing about Stoke is that you're starting from the point of coming to grips with the industry and where it is instead of trying to act like it still is the industry from 10 years ago and more importantly where it's going where

it's going that's where we want to go but you get to bake in the you know if you're looking around the corner you get to bake in where we're at now to your formula and this is the going back into the tech industry right this was like the google mantra of let's assume that servers are going to be really cheap one day so let's get a ton of really cheap servers rather than spending a bunch of money on very unique assets. You see this with the satellite industry, you know, billion dollar geo satellites are now, well, what if we had a constellation of really cheap satellites? And when you start looking at what are the things that I can kind of just say, this is the way it is now. And what do I do in that operation model? Now that people are comfortable with reusability and seeing that it does really lead to more reliability

and you can have a failure and be back flying in two or three weeks and no one's really batting an eye about that, there are trends that you can embrace and make that a core tenant of what you're working on and then say, all right, now what do we do with that? And that's the mindset that there's not that many companies in the market

that are thinking that way. I've had a couple of them on the show. K2 Space is one I'd point to of saying, when Starship is working, these are the payloads that we're going to need. Now, on the launch side, it's a bit of a different situation in the market. I like this too, because this was the bottom half of my outline, but we're jumping right into the bottom half, which I love. Um, the launch market is a really funny scenario right now in that, uh, and you, you said this in that interview, I referenced with payload that SpaceX had really changed the economic model for themselves and their own vehicles, but they haven't gotten to that magnitude

cheaper of launch yet. And largely they don't have to because there is no competitive pressure on them. So it's kind of up to the second or third provider that's going to compete on price in that way to make that change. So, you know, when you're talking about the cost model, as you begin developing this vehicle, was that, how does that calculus work out? How do you actually do that math knowing where the industry is at at the moment? Well, you, I mean, you want your, your cost basis to be as low as possible. Pricing is going to be market pricing, you know, no matter what.

And you want the biggest margin between those two as possible to run a profitable company. Right. It's really that simple. So yeah, like I was saying, you know, you, the way you get the lowest possible cost basis is by reusing the vehicle and flying it a lot. You can use the Southwest analogy or axiom, I guess, that an airplane on the ground isn't making money for you, and neither is a rocket. So you want that thing flying. You want it to quick turn. So that's kind of the founding worldview, and I think everything else is a derivative of that. We wanted to build the most robust space vehicle of all time.

We want to build the A-10 of rocketry. It's just this bulletproof thing that no matter what happens to it, it's ready to turn around and fly again. So everything, I think, is a derivative of that. number of things on the inside of the vehicle and there's um you know probably the most visible thing in in our unique architecture that you were alluding to is this uh our heat shield solution for the reusable upper stage uh when we're sitting in a basement trying to you know pencil this thing out we just couldn't get ourselves comfortable with something like a brittle ceramic tile that's gonna you know you're gonna take micrometeorite strikes. You will over the course of, I mean, shuttle did on many missions. So that's going to happen.

Is this thing ready to go despite that? So that's, you know, that's part one. And you're going to have like bird strikes, ice strikes. You're going to have ground operations where, you know, things get bumped. And the question is, if your thermal protection system is this traditional ceramic tile solution, is it ready to go? What do you do after that? After you detect a crack, do you have to x-ray it? Do you have to repair it? Whatever, right? And so we just couldn't get ourselves comfortable with that. But we came from a world where building rocket engines,

you use what's called regenerative cooling to cool the inside of rocket engines where the environment's like 20 times worse than re-entry conditions. And these things keep going. They keep going if they have cracks in the walls, right? It's just a very robust means of cooling with passive failure modes. And we couldn't get that out of our head. So we kind of latched onto this idea of actively cooled metallic heat shield. I think it works great. The challenge with it is how do you integrate that with the rest of the system in order to be mass efficient enough to still do the second stage mission?

And that's what required a lot of creativity. And again, I'll say whatever solution we came up with to this problem, we wanted it to be an engineering challenge and not a science problem. That was very important to me before we went out and raised investor capital where I take that seriously. I think we owe a return to the investors. And if it's a science problem, then it's just too big of a question mark, both on possibility and timeline. That's a really problem then it's just too big of a question mark both on possibility and timeline, right?

That's a really good way to look at it. There's areas in the industry where I think things are framed as an engineering problem that look more like science problems almost in the inverse to shout them out. There's things like spin launch that are like I mean, you could design a satellite to take 10 000 g's but that doesn't seem necessarily like a good good direction in my eye

um but there's the practical other end of that like you're talking about there so when you're when you're working in that direction is that that whole regenerative cooling heat shield is that what imposed the shape of the vehicle um because you wanted it to kind of function like that, the blunt body design or, uh, what was the, how did you end up at that particular shape is what I'm very curious. Yeah. I think, um, well, there's, there's a couple of things, the, the heat shield position, like you could do the belly flop re-entry, like a shuttle or a starship, um, surface area is a little bit bigger. Uh, so that means, bigger. So that means more area that needs to be covered. The other tricky thing with the belly flop

is you have two axes of acceleration that you have to build for structurally. So your belly flop, you're taking your reentry loads in the transverse direction, but your launch loads and your terminal descent landing loads in the axial direction. We liked staying axial for that reason. You get some structural efficiency by designing so that your acceleration loads are always in the axial direction. I think when you start talking about bringing things back from space,

like let's say we deploy a hosted payload on demand. It goes up, it performs a function over the course of a couple days, and then it comes back to ground. Let's just take that mission set, for example. You have to design your payload differently if you are going to come back and take reentry loads sideways, not just axial.

So there's some efficiencies there as well. Let's see. Oh, the other thing that really scared us is the cryofluid management. And interestingly, in the very early SpaceX, what did they call them? Whatever their hopper, Starhopper test flights, they were trying to figure out how to do this belly flop flip maneuver. That really scared us from a cryofluid management perspective to keep the run lines primed, net positive section pressure positive.

That seemed like a really tricky problem to us, but we didn't want to solve it yeah i mean so your former answer right like yeah the other the other thing definitely has a lot of a lot of things going for it in the direction of payload integration i think is probably the best argument to be honest that you're gonna open yourselves up to a more of a market there that people don't have to be like designing these payloads that can take dual direction or anything like that. Yeah, so we

said, hey, the capsule style base first reentry, in our opinion, was the best in every possible way. Maybe with one and a half exceptions, and that is, how do you build a high-performing upper stage engine and bury it into the heat shield somehow?

So if you do axial, you could come in nose first, but now you're putting all kinds of extra weight on that end and you've got these big heavy engines on the back end that hurts aerodynamic stability. So the question is then, how do you bury a high-performance upper stage engine into the base? And then went through all kinds of permutations trying to figure that out. At one point, we had kind of a novel-looking engine

more in the center of the base, and we used a gimbal strategy to steer it. But now you've introduced a hot gas dynamic seal into that design and um you know very similar to the ceramic tiles we just stared at that and you know we tried to justify it for as long as we we could but we never got comfortable with it you know that's another component that's mission critical and any number of stupid little things can just cause it to fail. And so we really then worked hard to design that out and wound up with the design that you see. I'm curious to dig into the payload on board that.

A couple things, right? There's the fairing that you've shown that's integrated that can kind of clamshell itself open and close back up for reentry. Before we even talk about the the volume of that you ended up in this five ton to leo kind of range did you select that specifically or did you have something else that was sizing the vehicle uh there's been a lot of talk in recent years of all these different vehicles coming out and why they picked what payload ranges so how did you end up in that territory? And are you feeling the draw to the higher payload ranges like many of the competitors are right now?

Well, I think, I think there's a big gap in the medium class rocket sector of the market. I think that if you could snap your fingers and launch anytime you wanted for equivalent price, you would actually launch more frequently in smaller batches. The reason I say that is, let's take a constellation, for example. If you're trying to deploy a constellation,

what you care about more than anything, I think, especially in a competitive environment, is time from factory to orbit, or to revenue, sorry sorry that's more important than just orbit factory to revenue is what you care about everything in between is dead inventory right so um you know in a world where you like so that's i guess maybe data point number one number two is um satellites are kind of settling out in this 500 to 1,000 kilo class size. And so the most optimal way to deploy a constellation, again, if you could snap your fingers and have launch anytime you want it for equivalent economics, you would launch about one launch per plane in order to minimize that time from factory to orbit.

I think that that's the fastest way to deploy. in order to minimize that time from factory to orbit. I think that's the fastest way to deploy. And so many constellations are in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 satellites per plane. Every constellation has its own design, but that's kind of a typical constellation. With 500 kilogram size satellites, boom, that's right there in the 5, five to 10,000 kilo class.

And so I think that's actually, you know, again, provided that you have availability, that's actually a more optimal way to deploy constellations than it is to aggregate, let's say a hundred satellites on the ground. The first satellite off the line is sitting on a shelf until the hundredth comes off the line. Then you've got this tricky integration. Then they launch and they get deployed. And then they have this six-month phasing period for them all to get to their final spot.

That's basically a year of dead inventory. You can't tell me that's optimal. And it's especially not optimal when the life of these satellites are three to five years now. It's kind of on the order of consumer electronics. It's not these 20-year lifespans. So this is actually an appreciable chunk of the entire life of the satellite is spent on the ground or waiting to get to service.

So I think, again, I think there's a big hole in medium class rockets. I think our size class really serves that market really well on a cost basis that's frankly different from anybody else in the market. And then the other thing I'll say is that, yeah, there's nothing about the architecture that doesn't scale, right? I've seen that kind of in in um the comment sections and stuff like that that oh does this thing scale how can you scale it up there's nothing there's nothing that doesn't prevent you from making a bigger rocket i think the biggest obstacle

which is true for any rocket is um over road transport that's it right so you know if you wanted to build a starship-sized vehicle, there's nothing that stops you from doing that, but you're probably not going to ship it over road from Seattle to Florida, right? So you're going to have to think strategically about where you build it, which, by the way, is exactly what SpaceX did to build Starship.

And what, frankly, ULA does, right? They're right there in Decatur on a river, and then they barge it over to Florida, right? I mean, hypothetically, one day day one could fly it from Seattle to Florida if it's a vehicle meant to fly. Just got to figure out launch retrograde. A couple regulations need to be maybe revised, but I would love that, right? I would love the whole topic of inland launch, I think, in the long run.

I think that's a very important topic and should be attacked. I think in the long run, it's a matter of national security as well to kind of diversify ourselves to multiple locations. And inland would be great. It comes down to reliability, though. What are the reliability numbers? That's what the FAA cares about. What is the risk to the uninformed public?

And our industry just needs to be more mature in order to answer the mail. Yeah. We need, we need to add a couple of zeros to, to everything to get there. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I think we know it's going to get there at some point, whether it's in our lifetime or in the next lifetime or whatever. Well, I think it's, it better be in our lifetime. I don't think it's that far away, but we do have to get there. It was interesting to hear their thoughts on the constellation deployment. That's a really interesting way to think about it because it makes me look at the current era of deploying these large constellations

as overly influenced by the way that launch manifests have acted for the last 10 or 15 years, where each launch was still pretty unique. And so there was that, that natural push to like, let's put more and more on this thing. And, you know, we are paying so much for this one individual launch that we better maximize every square inch of that payload volume and every single kilogram that we can actually put on this thing. Um, but yeah, I mean, on the other end of it, if, if you are operating in a world where you can fly more frequently for less

overall, this is an argument that people make even on big vehicles like Starship of, you know, if this costs less than Falcon nine to operate, then you can flip your thinking in this way. And it doesn't, you know, deploy a CubeSat with Starship if it's cheap enough,

like that's a thing that, that becomes a reality if the economics change to that degree. But it's still a kind of interesting balancing act to get the industry to that point. Would they ever do that? No, they wouldn't do it. Right?

Especially if there's another option that's even cheaper. But isn't that whole thing so intertwined that they wouldn't do that because if the industry has gotten to that point, so intertwined that they wouldn't do that? Because if the industry has gotten to that point, there's probably enough to fly on the vehicle. Like it seems a little bit counter self counteracting. Well, you need, you need enough people who want to fly to the same place at the same time. So there's going to be an optimal personally, I think it's actually going to be a bimodal distribution and optimals in our industry.

modal distribution and optimals in our industry. But take the airline industry as an example. A380 is supposed to have the lowest seat price of any aircraft because it has these economies of scale that are fantastic and blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, there's not enough people who want to go to the same place at the same time. And the operating cost is way more because the thing is huge. Right? So guess what?

It's out of production. We all do also love Ubers and Lyfts. That's a true fact. And we all love Ubers and Lyfts. Exactly. Rather than the bus. You can get a bus ticket for much less. That is a thing that I found that there's,

from the space shuttle era, I think this, I wasn't alive then, but I think these arguments were made in the early days of shuttle and in the early days of Starship, they were definitely made that there's a one style to rule them all kind of thing and i just that never tracked to me like we have all these specialized versions of transport between all it's not a hallmark of a mature industry it yeah it feels yeah it feels like we just haven't sorted out what the most efficient way to do the different jobs are like Job specialization is a thing for all of time,

for all industries. And to think that we're going to get to a solution that does everything and should do everything is kind of sad to me, honestly. I want weird looking vehicles. It's the wrong answer. There's going to be stratification. Like I said, there's going to be specialization.

You're going to have one class of vehicles, I think, that's laying heavy infrastructure. You're going to have human transport. There's a mass and a size class that you won't get below to fly a human because humans have a certain mass. And then we're special little flowers that that need things like oxygen and you know life support and whatever right so like that takes mass also uh so you know that i think human transport is a class right heavy infrastructure

is a class these things that deploy space station modules and whatnot um but then how do you service those things? Are you going to use a Starship to deliver fresh food every week? Nah, it's probably overkill, right? So think about it as building a skyscraper versus servicing a skyscraper. You're going to have little box trucks going every single day.

That's what we want. I love that vision. How does that play into the design of Nova, right? We've we talked about the payload fairing is that attached version, that's kind of the cargo fairing, if you will. But is that payload area, something that you're envisioning as would be kind of interchange and there might be, I mean, I know in the one video I saw where you're refueling a different upper stage, that that's where the docking port is up front. So kind of presuming that as a module that can be swapped out for different kinds of missions. That's exactly right. Yeah, not only that. So we have a cargo variant. Well, the cargo is the workhorse variant. Then we have a tanker variant

similar to Starship with the tanker. And you're exactly right. It's kind of a module that, you know, kind of, let's call it snap fit. Yeah right it's kind of a module that you know kind of let's call it snap fit yeah it's a little bit more than that but pops on um and then i mean regardless of how that changes in or out or if it if they're just different vehicles that the vehicle design is meant that that area can be used in different ways across different configurations that's right that's right but. But the upper stage overall, like in that, obviously this is a video that was a cool voiceover marketing thing. So you can tell me

if this is still what you're working on internally, but the entire vehicle, you know, heat shield and all was doing the rendezvous and docking in that case. So is that, are you looking at that as an integrated vehicle that, you know,

if you were to go service the space station, the whole thing, tank, heat shield, and all would be coming up to the space station as well to dock and deliver whatever it is? One of the unique things that our second stage can do is provide a very large Delta V, but also do those other phases of flight or those other modalities. That's a very unique capability. There's not really a vehicle on the market that has a significant Delta V capacity and can get back from space without separating and dropping a capsule back and throwing away the rest of the vehicle. When you allow the ability to refuel in space, that's really what unlocks all of that capability or a lot of that capability. You could also fly this thing as a payload.

The second stage can fly as a payload on heck, even a Falcon 9 or Vulcan or Nuke. Are you reading my notes? Are you reading my notes? Are you reading my notes? So you can launch it and fly it full, and now you get that full delta V and the return capability all from a single vehicle. Now, that's a tricky integration.

So you'd have to have a pretty committed customer. But there's nothing that says it can't be done. But being able to refuel in space it really unlocks a lot and you know that that shouldn't be a big surprise that's central to the starship capability starships actually you know it's a it's a hydrocarbon upper stage with also a heavy uh heat shield i think you know as as elon was alluding to in his latest interviews it's it's getting heavier right um and so it's not that great of a deep space vehicle in fact it's not great at all and um and so they re they require a lot of refuelings to do their artemis moon mission certainly their mars missions um if you were to rate the complexity would you uh

and certainly their Mars missions. If you were to rate the complexity, would you put out an infographic about how complex and high-risk it is, or would you not? For Starship? Yeah, you know, high-risk, insane complexity, whatever the infographics were back in the day. I think it's a...

The number of refuelings, I is under, under talked about, right? I think, I think it, I think it takes a lot to get that mission done. Um, now on the down mass side of this, that, that you've brought up a couple of times, are you able to support the full volume or the full mass that you have on a scent? Or are you, you know, it's five tons up. Is that come down to like three tons down or where does that end up yeah it's not quite the full mass down um and then i would say that there's other there's also permutations to you know you can optimize the same architecture and trade delta v for down mass and things like that.

There's different permutations. There's also different adaptations that we can do to the second stage to improve down mass. In fact, the vehicle that will fly to orbit is going to look slightly different than what we've shown to date. The reason is it about doubles the down mass capacity and also reduces some of the pre-flight vacuum performance risk. So you'll see that at some point. But yeah, there's some different things that we can play to kind of optimize around one solution or another. But for

us right now, we're pretty focused on, first of all, getting to space. If we do that on the first try, I think we're the first organization of all time to do it on the first try. So, you know, certainly have a lot of respect for the challenge of just getting to space. And then we'll work on the through space and back from space part. All right. You mentioned that this could obviously fly on a different vehicle. And one of the questions I had written down was, why don't you do that first? Because I think your mantra so far has been, we've got to figure out this second stage before we go and build the first stage, because they are very tightly integrated. And we don't exactly know where we're going to end up with, you know, the heat shield and the engine situation, I think was the primary thing you were talking about in that case. But why not send one of these up and try the reentry portion first? Are there things that you might learn during that phase that would change the design enough that you would want to bring that design back down to the first stage side as well? And was there anything to be gained by doing a flight of your second stage as the primary thing? It's very simple.

Money, probably, is my guess guess launch availability and money yeah okay the sticker price for like if i wanted to if i wanted to ship a cardboard box on a falcon 9 that's cost 70 million dollars right that's like the base price 70 million bucks now if i say you know what i'm actually not it's not a cardboard box this is a hydrogen oxygen vehicle We got to bring in ground systems. We got to fuel it. Uh, there's going to be risk on it to the rest of your vehicle that by the way, you know, you want to fly humans on for the next flight, right? Uh, I'm pretty sure that price is no longer $70 million. I'm pretty sure it's a lot higher. And now we're talking about as much money as, uh, you know as the total amount of money

that we've spent as a company since inception. Just to pay somebody else. For a test that might not even get to the point that you actually really cared about. Yeah, and by the way, we're not their priority. And they care about 47 other things first. So they're probably going to kick us two-year lead time. We've done a lot in two years, right?

With $100 million. So yeah, it all comes down to availability and what's the best use of $100 million plus that I can use and it's probably not pay Elon. That's an aspect of the industry that I hope someday is different as well. Well, that's the whole name of the game. Yeah, it's something that we're super limited on right now.

But when you look at systems that fly on aircraft, attaching that to a different aircraft and testing it out and giving a flight test, whether it's a sensor or a payload package or something, or even back in the day, you look at when they were doing the drones off of the SR-71s and they were able to fly that up on a very unique test bed. It just doesn't work the same way. Well, that probably wasn't cheap either.

I don't think that was cheap, yeah. But that's because aircraft, first of all, the cost of a flight is not that much. And it's not a supply-constrained market. Launch is a supply-constrained market, full stop. And it will be through at least the decade. So it's just not available. It's a two-year lead time, and it costs a boatload. That's what I was trying to communicate in the payload podcast a little bit.

It's not actually the economics of launch for anybody not named SpaceX are not actually that much different than they were pre-SpaceX. I think when you think about it and when you actually pencil out basically what we just talked about, it's interesting. You talk to all kinds of satellite companies. The cost to deploy a new satellite constellation, the total cost that includes production, labor, all of this stuff, the cost it takes to deploy new satellites is between 40% and 70% launch.

Just for launch. So you look at all the billions of dollars that are being raised for the space economy, 40 to 70% of that goes to launch. That doesn't mean that we have healthy launch economics yet. No, nor does it really, you know, in that same way I could make the argument that it's like, well then lowering the launch cost isn't that much of a driver

compared to these other things, right? If 60% of your costs are everything else, how are we making that cheaper as well? And how interrelated are those where some of the things that you have to do on the other pieces of your architecture? That includes factory, that includes labor, that includes raw materials and electronics, right?

Like that's where you want to spend your money is on your special sauce. Yeah, and then the interesting thing to run math on is, you know, as launch economics change, what can you change about those other things that also bring the cost down? If you don't have to, you know, overly test these things or overly design them because things are more throwaway. Um, those are the areas where you can make a really big impact and bring your overall costs quite a bit lower, but it is, it is weird. You know, the, the fact that the industry at large,

I've been having, I don't know if you're the one to help me out with my existential crisis that I've been having the last couple of weeks, but probably since the Falcon 9 failure that was a month or two ago. And there was a lot of thoughts then of, you know, holy crap, this could really derail many plans that we have going on in the near future.

They were flying two or three weeks later because of what we talked about earlier, but, um, that particular failure, um, the big thing for the FAA is what is the risk to the uninformed public, right? So that particular failure was on the second stage and didn't really impact the uninformed public. And I think that was a very important reason for their ability to turn around and fly so quickly.

Now, was their full anomaly resolution and failure investigation complete? Probably not, but it didn't affect the uninformed public, as I understand it. But I also don't know that problem very deeply. But that's my interpretation. Yeah, absolutely. But the interesting thing I've been thinking about is that SpaceX is the extreme outlier in the industry right now in every way. A lot of people, anyone starts up and you immediately get compared to them,

but they remain the outlier in almost every part of the industry that they've entered, whether it's crewed spaceflight or satellite operations or launch operations. Not to say there aren't people working on it, you included, but they are still the extreme outlier in those ways. And there's also the commercial space industry right now is kind of just SpaceX. It is so dependent on them as a crew provider, as a frequent launch provider, in all these ways that if they were offline for a year, what would that do to the commercial space industry at large is pretty apocalyptic. Well, it's not just commercial. What would that do to our government position, right? Absolutely. But the thing that I've been wondering is that

the standard storyline is they, because of their operations, are enabling a commercial space industry that is going to continue to grow and flourish for 20 years or whatever i could also see a storyline that in 20 years their dominance of this era is a thing that kills momentum of a commercial space industry because they've raised the bar on different parts of the industry so high that to be able to compete is very tough and it can actually it could limit real viable competitors sprouting up in their different areas it already is it already is um you know they look the benefits of spacex go to spacex first and foremost right and and really why shouldn't they right yeah right right like they earned it yeah they earned it.

That's not the hallmark of a healthy, robust industry or economy. You need competition in there to make it healthy. If you look at the deployment of OneWeb, it basically died because of terrible launch economics. They couldn't launch with SpaceX early on. They tried to buy anything else and everything else. Those launches were ridiculously expensive and kept slipping, got pulled away from them.

They were launching on the Russian system out of Ukraine. They're just satellites stolen. Exactly. And then they finally finished deploying on a Falcon 9. Russian system out of Ukraine and guess what? Satellites stolen. Yes. Yeah, right. Exactly. Oops. Gone. And then they finally launched, finished deploying on a Falcon 9 because that's their only choice. After going through bankruptcy. After going through bankruptcy. By the time that actually happened, their initially deployed satellites

were already out of service. Right. It was just kind of crazy. The economics for anybody not named spacex are not wildly different today yeah and that should be concerning it's why we need somebody else to step up yeah and in order for it to work you have to you have to match economics and you have to at least match availability or beat availability right how do you and by the way you have to at least match availability or beat availability, right? And by the way, you have to do those things also

when Starship comes online and is successful. And that's, yeah, right. And I mean, I think to SpaceX's credit, right, they are moving in that Starship direction. Like one of the big concerns for SpaceX is that they eventually, because of the circle of life, they will become the crusty incumbent that is resistant to change and trying to keep people out through

all these different means and then lobbying to keep the way it is so that they remain on top. They will get there at some point. Don't fool yourself. I mean, there's definitely been incidents incidents right and but at the same time they are willing to go and and work on an entirely new product line that is going to if it works cannibalize their current one they they right they are still refreshing themselves in that way and if that part of the company is still vibrant i not all is lost there but i don't think that will last forever because there are very few companies in which that has lasted forever in the history of, of capitalism. Um, but, but how do you think it, it got to this situation where they are an extreme outlier and anchoring the industry in this way, um,

across launch and satellites and crude spaceflight? I think the, the biggest thing that they did was remind us as humans that it's okay to fail and that we will fail and we need to set up the company and the development plan to be successful in the face of failure. We didn't get to the moon by designing something perfectly on the first try and going to, we blew up a lot of stuff in the sixties, a lot. And through that process, we learned so quickly and we had a more robust system that came out of it. Somewhere along the line, we became ridiculously risk-averse, so risk-averse.

Every failure is catastrophe and whatever. It was just completely unacceptable. And Elon came in and reminded everybody that that's actually not the way you develop hardware and make it robust, right? They didn't stop. I mean, you see it over and over again. They didn't stop with Raptor 1. They made Raptor 2.

And now they made this unreal Raptor 3. Partially disassembled. This idea of being able to break things, push the limits, understand where the weak spots are, and build robustness through responding to failure is very powerful. And very few companies embody that or embrace that.

And I think that's a really, really important thing. You have to design the entire rest of the, not only the vehicle, but also the company behind the vehicle or behind the factory or whatever to succeed in that mentality. dollar bespoke assets, if you make smaller, cheaper assets that aren't as catastrophic to lose, then you can turn around and go again. I think that's the biggest thing. And he's introduced that at SpaceX. He's introduced that at Tesla. I think he's really kind of taught the world how to do iterative design again. We forgot it. It's not like we never knew it.

We just forgot it. Yeah, prioritize other things. Do you find as somebody that's working on a company that, you know, on one of the sectors that SpaceX works in is a good shot at being that second or third provider that provides the competitive pressure that you and I both openly state that we want. One of the big things is the iteration speed and being able to fly frequently enough

and both in terms of actually operating the vehicle, but having the payloads available, having the customer base, and having the finances to be able to do that. And there's a couple of different aspects that enable it um is it harder to get to an iteration speed that is that is helpful in in a world where spacex is operating the way that they are like is it is there enough room in the market to give you the enough of those early reps to actually get to that point that's that's the concern that i have when I say of existential dread

is that they are blotting out the sun in many areas. And it becomes another thing that you have to have a strategy for. I think that the answer to this depends on timing, which I think you also alluded to. I think that there's, I think it's day one. I think that there's I think it's day one we have not proven the full potential

of low cost economics of fully reusable vehicles yet there's still an order of magnitude at least an order of magnitude that we can take off of the cost structure of launch and so I think that that

opportunity creates the willingness to fail and the room that you're talking about in order to fail and iterate and get to the end state. There's that, and then there's also the fact that the launch market is very supply constrained right now, and many customers are desperate for any alternative in the market.

So those two truths create the opportunity and the window to iterate and design and develop the second or third player in the industry. Once those economics are proven and once you have two to three to four, let's call it four players in the market, I think the market is certainly big enough to support at least a handful of players. But once those economics are proven, and you kind of get to that end state or close to that end state of the industry, then I think the window's shut, the door's shut. And I think that's exactly what happened, take aircraft for example, or some of these larger CapEx type of companies.

Once those economics are proven and you're kind of at the end state, the whole world consolidates around two, three, four players. So that's why we're stuck with, not stuck with, but that's why the aerospace industry has a Northrop, it has players right so that's why we're stuck with uh not stuck with but that's why the the um the aerospace industry has a northrop it has a boeing it has a lockheed um and that's like kind of it yeah right and even the commercial aircraft side is probably a better point that there's basically two and then there's some like smaller regional jets that are created you know crjs and whatnot which are also by the way good businesses but they're just not as huge as fun um and so uh i think the same i think you're gonna see the same thing in space

i think that that will happen in space um but it's not yet because there's so it's still too early but it's a time bounded as a time bounded window of opportunity um it's it's tricky when there's so many different aspects to it to track what is the thing that is I don't know, there's just so much that has to come together at the right time to be able to, because hypothetically if the market were five years down the line the arrival of Amazon Kuiper

would have been a really great opportunity for vehicles that were flying to get a bunch of contracts and actively start flying right away. They had to go buy a ton of launches from vehicles that have never flown. And in some cases, you know, they've two out of three that got their first flights under the way. But they're still not flying. Right. They're still not flying actively.

And so it's weird in that, you you know the other big outlier of how many billions of dollars are we spending for how many thousands of satellites has arrived and no one is ready to fly them yet uh of course the satellites aren't yet well ready i don't think you've seen them driving by uh your house up there in washington but that's another aspect i think i think um any other constellation is in a very similar situation to what OneWeb was. It's supply constrained. SpaceX will fly some here and there with a two-year wait

and intersperse them with their 70 Starlink launches a year and the government payloads next. But it's not going to be a timely deployment, I don't think. And so that's a huge headwind on the industry. It's still supply constrained. The industry can only grow by as much as the launch industry can produce. That's it. That's the choke point of the industry.

We need to blow that open. When you look around the industry at large, we talked probably too much about SpaceX, but I think we did in a way that wasn't the kitschy, normal way that everyone talks about SpaceX, so I appreciate you entertaining my existential questions. SpaceX is enabling the entire...

I mean, it really is enabling the entire industry right now. It is. They're the lead blockers for the industry. They've done an incredible job. And that's great. But that creates opportunity for so many more people, including us.

Who else are you watching closely as, well, this is interesting to work alongside these people, right? Like Rocket Lab come to mind, certainly with what they're doing with Neutron. Just curious what you assess out there. There used to be thousands of companies working on launch, and I think that's whittled down

to the appropriate number of like, all right, these are the interesting competitors. So who's on the top of the list that you're keeping track of? Well, you mentioned Rocket Lab. I have a huge amount of respect for them. I like the companies that are able to... Well, you mentioned hundreds of companies in the industry. I like the companies that are able to...

Well, you mentioned hundreds of companies in the industry. I think there are a lot of PowerPoint rockets out there. I think there's a lot of noise in our industry, a lot of creative ideas that may or may not have held water. I think Rocket Lab I do have a lot of respect for. They don't really fall into any of those camps. I think they think through their things in general, do what they say and say what they do. So I do have a lot of respect for Rocket Lab.

But what I would say is I didn't set out when I decided I was moving on from my last job. I didn't set out to start a I was moving on from my last job. I didn't set out to start a company. It wasn't like the goal. The goal was to figure out where the industry is going and join the winner or join the person who's building or the company that was building toward that. And the bottom line is I couldn't find it. And that's why we started the company.

And that's why I think our company is still incredibly well positioned to stand up there and move the industry forward. Nobody else is working on full rapid reuse other than us and SpaceX. That's it. And that's still true today, which blows me away, but it's true. It's totally true. And yeah, I mean, the rocket lab one is tricky, because they definitely always put their plans out there. But there's always one or two things that they end up you end up realizing, oh, they were holding that back, they were holding that that piece of info back. And the same way that you said, you know, your vehicle is going to look different when you actually fly it, then, then you're you've got on the website today, or the pictures that are out

there, whatever. But that's kind of always the case where you're working, you know, ahead of what the public knows. So in that way, I think I'm like, well, we'll see what they do at the upper stage of Neutron. I still feel like there's a little too much hiding in that fairing for me. Like I just have a little bit of a spidey sense that there's something different that will fly out of that fairing one day. Uh, then there's, then they're showing publicly. Um, but they, I mean, they, they are, uh, the other aspect we probably should touch on is that, you know, all these other companies are, they have another thing that they have launched and another thing. And SpaceX has Starlink and everything else they're working as well as the NASA contracts and all that.

Rocket Lab has the whole space system side. Stoke does have a software end to it as well. Um, do you consider that kind of as far as from launches you would get, or are there plans to, to grow into these other areas as well. Do you consider that kind of as far as from launches you would get, or are there plans to, to grow into these other areas as well? I think the TAM on the software side is huge, but there again, you know, it's not like we set out the company and said, Hey, we're going to have, you know, two business lines. We set out the company and started building that software because we needed it and it doesn't exist on the market. And then we said, Hey, you know what, this is actually a great opportunity. And we'll actually make our product better for us if we also work with external partners. And so

that's really the genesis of that product line. But we're really focused on solving the mobility. And I guess the way you alluded to it is once you own mobility, you kind of are keepers of the alluded to it is once you own mobility you kind of are keepers of the keys to the gate of the economy right and if you look at the aerospace primes as an example they the big aerospace primes of today are the ones who solved mobility first they're the they're the big players and then they build you know now they have this kind of uh structural advantage over everybody else for all the other things, right? Because they have the platform and they can kind of add layers on top of that. And I think that's 100% true for the space economy as well.

And so that's kind of the lens that I view it. I'm not going to go into other things that we might be working on, but I think that the owning the mobility or mastering mobility is a platform that you build on uh we talked a lot about the vision for the company and what you're doing um i'm curious just for the last couple minutes to hear what it's like to work at stoke you know we've from the outside we kind of have general vibes of what it's like to work these different places in the industry but But with the new competitors, we really don't.

So we'd love to hear also how big is the company today and then what's the work vibe like there? Well, we're about 140 people. I think we've done a lot with a little. We're only just 140 people. If I remember right, we're around 100 people at the beginning of the year. So kind of growing methodically. We've gotten a lot of unbelievable talent, kind of cherry-picked from the industry and very selective on that front. So we've gotten a lot of unbelievable people, but we also set out to build a different hardware solution, but also maybe build a little bit of a different culture than what is typical in aerospace.

And I'm real proud of that. We look for not only amazing technical execution people, but also incredible human beings. And I think we've done a really good job on that front too. So there's a lot of humility. It takes a lot of humility to be successful in this industry. The second you get cocky with a rocket or a rocket engine, it puts you on your ass real quick. So you have to stay humble to be successful, I think.

And I think we've got a great vibe. And, yeah, location-wise, you've got the test site. That's I think three hours from the office. It's probably fun road trips where you're throwing something on the truck and heading out that way. Some people are probably sick of that road trip, but, um, look, we, you know, I think there's a huge, it's hugely important to keep test and design and manufacturing as tightly coupled as possible um we talked about the the speed of iteration is kind of that dictates the speed of development

um so to be able to design something get it out to the test stand and uh test it learn something new drive it back make an iteration get it back on the test stand is really, really important. So it was very important for us to find a, and start building a test location that's as tightly coupled as reasonably possible. And so it's a three hour drive, which is annoying, but you can still make a round trip in a day. And we do that all the time. We can shuttle parts off the test stand, back into the machine shop, get a machine, you know, design up an iteration machine at the next day and drive it out and have it back on the machine shop, get a machine, you know, design up an iteration machine the next day and drive it out and have it back on the stand. And we can do that pretty quick turn. It's three hours away, but it's, um, but it's not a plane ride. You're not crossing time zones. Uh,

it's, it's significantly more convenient than, you know, a lot of other, uh, I guess situations. Yeah. It's hard to find places that have significant population and talent centers that are also accessible to, to a place like that. Moses Lake is interesting. Um,

it actually does have a pretty significant aerospace and, um, yeah, aerospace industry out there, even though it's a pretty small town. That's awesome. Well, Andy,

I appreciate hanging out with me and spending so much time and getting into weird conversations. Uh, it's, it's been awesome to chat with you. Well, Andy, I appreciate hanging out with me and spending so much time and getting into weird conversations. It's been awesome to chat with you. So anything else you want to plug before we drop? I don't know if you're at 140. I don't know how many more you're looking to add. But if that's a place you want to point people, that'd be cool. the website. I'm just really, really proud of the team. We've done a lot with a little built two pretty high-end engines in a very short amount of time. And all the facilities that go behind

that, and we've got a long way to go. We're building our first flight, our orbital flight vehicle already today. We're chomping at the bit, and we've done a lot down at the Cape as well. We're building that team. So there's a lot,

that's a lot of progress behind the scenes that that's already happened down there and a lot more to come. So we're charging hard. Awesome. Well, yeah, I mean, I was at all section of Cape Canaveral stuff to talk about,

but we'll have to do a part two sometime to catch that. So I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Yeah, absolutely. So I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks again, Andy, for coming on the show, for spending so much time with me and getting into all those discussions.

I thought it was really open and honest in a way that's very refreshing. A lot of times when you talk to people in the space industry, you know, this is why I don't interview a lot of astronauts. You kind of know you're going to hear what you've heard before from that person,

but definitely not the case here. Andy always came to talk about whatever, any topic on the list. So that is refreshing. I love talking to those kind of people. So very much appreciate him and the rest of Stokes Space for entertaining it. And I'm really excited to follow along with what they're working on over the next couple of years. So I'm sure maybe a visit down to the cape would be in order per where i left that conversation

so we'll see if that is something i can pull off in the future before we get out here for the day i want to say thank you to everyone who supports main engine cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support there are over 850 of you across patreon and substack can head to either place and support the show links in the show notes for that. This episode was produced by 31 executive producers. Thank you to Steve, Fred, Eunice, Better Everyday Studios,

Stealth Julian, Chris, Theo and Violet, Harrison, Matt, Josh from Impulse, Russell, Warren, Pat from KC, Ryan, Jan, Donald, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Bob, Pat, Joel, Will and Lars from Agile Space, David at the Astrogators at SCE, Lars, Donald, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Bob, Pat, Joel, Will and Lars from Agile Space, David at the Astrogators at SCE, Lars, Frank, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support for making this possible. If you want to join that crew and

get Miko headlines in your feed every single week, that's an entire other podcast that I do running through all the stories in space that you need to care about. I sort through all the space news so that you don't have to. It's a great way to stay up to date on the news industry and also support what I'm doing here. So consider that if you like what I'm doing here. I think you'll love that show. But that's all I've got for you today. Thank you all so much for listening. And I will talk to you next time. As always, I'm within range of my second child showing up. So if there's a an unexplained absence for however long that that's going to be a couple of weeks before I get my sleep, uh,

situated, I will, uh, try to update you on what's going on there, but until then, thanks to all. And I'll talk to you soon.