Main Engine Cut Off - T+301: Hypersonics and Constellations (with Caleb Henry)

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Caleb Henry, Director of Research at Quilty Space, joins me to talk megaconstellations, the hypersonics industry, and more.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Joonas, Josh from Impulse, Heiko, Donald, Stealth Julian, Warren, Kris, Frank, Steve, Bob, Better Every Day Studios, The Astrogators at SEE, Joakim (Jo-Kim), Fred, Matt, Pat from KC, Natasha Tsakos (pronounced Tszakos), Joel, Theo and Violet, Russell, Jan, Pat, Ryan, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), David, Will and Lars from Agile, Lee, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsCaleb Henry (@ChenrySpace) / XThe OneWeb Book | Caleb Henry | SubstackQuilty SpaceArmed services committees propose $150 billion funding boost for defense - SpaceNewsUrsa Major wins $28.5 million Air Force contract to flight-test Draper engine for hypersonic use - SpaceNewsUnited Airlines bumps GEO operators off fleet for Starlink Wi-Fi - SpaceNewsFree Starlink Wi-Fi now on most Hawaiian Airlines transpacific fleet - SpaceNewsAtlas launches first operational Project Kuiper satellites - SpaceNewsProject Kuiper on X: “Take a look at this @ULAlaunch clip of the first Kuiper satellites being released into low Earth orbit approximately 280 miles above the planet. Deployment takes place over a 15-minute period after launch, with satellites released three at a time from the dispenser system.”Here’s your first look at Project Kuiper’s low-cost customer terminalsAssessing Kuiper’s Satellite Manufacturing Delays — Quilty SpaceElon vs EchoStar: Starlink’s RF Snitch Mission, Explained | QuickTakes — Quilty SpaceThe 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 NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo and we've got our friend Caleb Henry back here on the show to talk about Constellations, HyperSonics, his book, all sorts of good stuff. So before we get into it, I want to say thank you to everyone who made this episode possible. Thanks to Eunice, Josh from Impulse, Heiko, Donald, Stealth Julian, Warren, Chris, Frank, Steve, Bob, Better Everyday Studios, The Astrogators at SCE, Joakim, Fred, Matt, Pat from KC, Natasha, Sakos, Sakos? Sazakos? I don't know. You said to try it. I gave it a shot. Joel, Theo and Violetet, Russell, John, Pat, Ryan, Tim Dodd, David Ashnott, David, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Lee, and four anonymous executive producers.

Thank you all so much for making this happen. If you like what I'm doing here, head over to managercutoff.com slash support. Sign up there. You get access to Miko headlines. I do an extra show every single week running through all the space stories that happen, giving you quick takes and updates on the things that matter filtering out the stuff that doesn't it's great way to support the show, stay up on the news. And yeah, I thank you all so much for that. So without further ado, let's jump into our conversation with Caleb. Caleb welcome. Welcome. I flubbed it. Flubbed it. Starting over. I'm raising

the mic. I realized the mic was too low. And I started thinking about that. And I flubbed it. Flubbed it. You want to start over? I'm starting over. I'm raising the mic. I realized the mic was too low and I started thinking about that and I flubbed it. Maybe we're just rolling. It's Caleb Henry. He's back on the show for the bajillionth time. And I miss you. You don't live near me anymore. It's been too long since we talked. How you doing? I miss you too, man. Good to see you. Good to talk to you.

It's always good. Sometimes I'm like, it's good when it takes a while to get you back on the show because then so much happens in the world of Constellations and all of a sudden now you tell me you're sitting in hypersonics over there at Quilty. So yeah, before we start about Constellations, what's up at Quilty these days? What's your role? Last time we talked, maybe that was off nominal, was director of research. Is that still accurate? And my memory is accurate?

That's still the title? Yes. So what are you guys working on these days? I'm still director of research. Quilty has been doing a lot related to constellations. I'd say that was probably our biggest area of activity. Of course, we had our Starlink report. I think that's when we last spoke and we had our model. We did the first one and then like kind of end of 2023 into 2024.

And then we did our second one where we did our first kind of forward looking forecast of how much revenue we think that they're going to make, which was really interesting. Let me see if I've got, I think I had it open really recently, so I might be able to just pull it up off the top of my head. I want to say we were forecasting like 12 billion dollars this year, full year 2025, which is like almost double what we had as the forecast for last year. If people are starting to be like, when are they going to make as much money as NASA? And those are those lines might be converging as we now see the skinny budget is getting rolled out.

Yeah, yeah, you know, they are. One's going up, one's going down. But yeah, a lot of constellation work. I have been reading some of our new initiatives covering hypersonics, which is really interesting. When I first joined the space industry and I saw this overlap between missiles and space, I kept thinking like, why are people doing that? Like one is clearly not space and the other is. And I've since been corrected. I've learned that there's a lot of overlap between the

two. And some are really obvious examples like rocket lab using their electron, modifying it as the haste vehicle for hypersonics, orbital missions. And then some are less obvious, like having radars that, in order to track missiles that go up into space, need to have range that goes all the way up to low Earth orbit. And so you start seeing new facilities come online that can help with missile defense, but can also improve our tracking and awareness of objects in orbit around Earth. So that's really cool. We just rolled out today actually our first of a new report called the Mach 5, which is a monthly cover of everything that's happening

in hypersonics land with special attention when it overlaps with space. And that's something that if people like, will continue to do. And it is behind the paywall, but it's inspired by a similar report for everything that happens in the world of mega constellations. We round up once a month and then we include kind of our own analysis to go with it. And that's been really well received by the industry. So we'll see if they like this too. And we're just trying to answer questions that people have really. I mean, the hypersonic thing has been interesting because there was there's phases of it, right?

There were, there was a phase of everyone that was working on a space plane was like, uh, so we're not going to go orbital anymore. We're just going to do hypersonic research. That was, that was like phase one of the shift to hypersonics. Then there's, yeah, the rocket providers, rocket lab, ABL just pivoted hard into hypersonics only pretty much. They just, they determined that they're not going to compete in the launch services sector. So they're going, they renamed the company long wall and they're focused on hypersonics. Um. And then like you're saying, there's these kind of auxiliary things that you need in that domain, which is ground based tracking, the golden dome program is going to be a whole thing. Now there, you know, the DOD budgets floated

through, is it the Senate or House? I forget which side has this house through the house of like, we're going to spend a trillion this year and 25 billion on Golden Dome space systems specifically. So yeah, I mean, there's it's, it's a huge section of overlap. And it's from when from your angle of things, right? Is it is it understanding that market generally, because there is just now really this like market dynamic at play where there's there's people offering customers like a easy rides on hypersonic space craft hypersonic vehicles that we're gonna launch on rocket lab stuff since we want so much and i a b l thinking that there's actually a product line there where there wasn't before and I guess the old days it was really just you know some excess military solid rocket motors or something that are doing these tests and a couple of glide vehicles but now there feels like there's like that commercial space industry unleashed on it. Is that is that

why your interest is peaked? It's a couple of reasons. It's definitely what you said there. I think the genesis of the idea actually came from seeing all those small launch providers either diversify or pivot entirely into hypersonics and then asking the question why and seeing that the US budget for hypersonics has grown really rapidly. Over two years, it went from like, I want to say it was 4.7 billion to 6.9 in the last FY 2024 budget request. And now we see this Golden Dome initiative. I think you mentioned there's like $24.7 billion that's being put towards that. And

that's just a space side of it. It's like 150 billion total, I think. Yeah, 150 billion total for all things defense and then the 25 billion for space and whatnot. A whole NASA worth of... A NASA budget just for military. An old NASA budget. It hurts already. So but yeah, we're seeing that. You're seeing like money being put towards like missile tracking satellites to possibly

even in- space interceptors, which I know is a real controversial idea that never seems to die. I think that Todd Harrison at AEI, I think this was the thing he tried to put to bed several years ago and it just keeps coming back. But no, you see all this money that's going into it. And I think the industry has realized a couple of things. For the small launch guys, some of them saw a way to diversify. And there was this realization, basically everybody that launches a small market. And when the mega constellations did not go to the small launch

providers, they needed to find new ways to make money. And defense was a very clear path to do that you've already mastered propulsion. You're halfway basically you've created a missile, it just doesn't kill people. I mean, honestly, like most of them did pretty good at getting hypersonic speeds. And not a lot of them did good at getting the orbital speeds. So still, yeah, so like maybe we should. We're good at. But you have that big pivot. And it's that that budgetary growth.

And so I think not even just in hypersonics, but seeing a lot of space companies in general, like re-examine the defense side of the business. This is especially prevalent in like the Earth observation side. You see Planet doubling down on that. So, Satellogic, like basically becoming a US company to try and tap into that. You've got all your synthetic aperture radar folks that are waiting to see if the military will basically do like a blanket, you know, commercial purchase the way they do for optical imagery. You've got the EOCL contract for Maxar, Planet, Black Sky. Are we going to see another one for radar because of how much utility it's shown in Ukraine and elsewhere? And I think there was just a lot of things that were going to put people in that direction of like, okay, pivoting to defense.

Also all the new startups, Anduril, Palantir, like defense is cool again. I think there was also, well, that's the aspect there, right? Is that there's like, talk about a vibe shift. I think it's a lot more palatable 2025, a couple of years into Russia invading Ukraine to say, like to take defense seriously. It's not just this American imperialism thing. You know, there's certainly still those criticisms that are valid in those domains. But, you know, when you and I were growing up, that was like all the talk. Now there's like, no,

there's legitimate threats out there and there's bad actors doing bad things right now. And we're the industry that literally provably counteracted it. When we watched the Russian military march into Ukraine via satellite imagery that was, you know, you could buy for 10 bucks or whatever planet was selling it for at the time, like probably higher than $10, but not much compared to what you used to have to spend on that. So that feels like that kicked off a, a trend of people realizing like, okay, like, there are good uses for defense technology that that you don't have to feel bad about in this, you know, this current era as bad as that is, I do think that impacted the way that people looked at going to work at those companies that didn't feel that way in the early 2000s and the 2010s. I also think that continuing with the space industry's efforts to adapt to threats, you know, there was that infamous quote from, I want to say it was General Hyten,

like seven or eight years ago, not buying any more big fat juicy targets, the big exquisite satellites. And so we got the SDA, we got this proliferated Leo constellation and everything went small. Just small sats are getting bigger now, but we went to smaller spacecraft and more numbers. And the idea was how do we prevent the sort of like space Pearl Harbor, where the US could be really vulnerable to an attack that would kind of reset our understanding of like how strong the country is. And hypersonics sort of threatened to do that again. You know, there was an article where Hegseth was saying that in simulations, like hypersonics basically wiped out the whole US aircraft carrier fleet in like 20 minutes.

And then there's a similar war game scenario that the UK did, trying to see how they would deal with the hypersonic assault from Russia. And the answer was badly. And so it's this wake up call across the West that says, Hey, like, this looks like a real big vulnerability. And I don't think people ever really planned to play catch up. That idea of playing catch up to Russia and China is one that I think has invigorated a lot of people to try and create new tech to ensure that the country is safe.

Yeah. And yeah, and like big scale wars like back on the menu in a depressing way that it wasn't, you know, for most of our lives growing up, it was the smaller scale engagements or proxy wars or insurgencies or whatever. But now it's like, you know, big deals. Yeah. Well, I didn't expect us to talk about hypersonics for the first 11 minutes of the show, to be

honest, but not entirely unrelated, honestly, from the communication side of things, because Starlink obviously had a huge part in the Ukraine war in the early days, too. I don't know how much that shifted the prospects of Starlink generally, but you know, since we've talked last and you did those initial Starlink revenue projections, you know, they've announced, I don't know how many partnerships with different airlines or aircraft manufacturers, but that seems to have really flourished whether all of them are online or not. I think they're getting deployed over the next couple of years, but I don't know that that was unexpected from your side. I assume that you

expected to see that on the aviation industry. But how do you feel like that has gone for SpaceX? Yeah, we expected them to do well, but not to the scale that they are. And I'll give two examples. In aircraft connectivity, it's the United deal, like that just shook the whole industry. Nobody expected United to give all 1000 of their aircraft that were upbid to Starlink. The expectation was that Starlink could get a chunk, everybody would get a piece, basically, and if I sat there, probably get a few hundred, maybe Panasonic could get a few hundred and Starcraft could get a few hundred.

And instead, they bet the farm on a single sort of unproven provider, but as a fast learner, they're rolling out really quick. And so that really reset, it's going to put the whole traditional IFC industry into like a defensive posture of like, oh, we thought that we were a short business here. And now we know that Starlink is a very, very real threat. And then the other one would be in maritime. When Starlink released their own report at December, end of December, I want to say, they mentioned having 75,000 vessels connected,

which was like more than the rest of the industry combined. Like it was a staggering, we redid our model because we just did not. And we had to be like, where are the rest of the boats? I think we're like, okay, well, there's this many river boats that are out there. They don't usually use satellite connectivity. We had to go find the boats because the satellite industry is obsessed with like cruise ships. They're obsessed with big, expensive boats that buy lots of capacity and

we're accepting of terminals that were so big, you had to get a crane to install them on the boat. And Starling came in and said, no, you don't need that. And all the arguments that were against them like, oh, you know, there's going to be the master, the boat's going to block the antenna. Starlink was like, well, just put two, okay? You know, a couple hundred dollars, a couple thousand now, because it's an enterprise terminal, but like put two or four or eight, like we don't care.

Just put as many, make a Christmas tree of them until you've got your signal and problem solved. They really swept in that area, and I think it's interesting because so many other players in the satellite industry said, well, we don't have to worry about really competing with Starlink because Starlink is first and foremost a consumer system. We are not. So, you know, if they do one thing, we do another. That's just not true. It was barely true to begin with. And it's certainly not true today. So everybody has to face them out in the market and virtually every market that exists for satellite communications.

And it's hard. I think that's why there was so much tension on the Kuiper launch because everyone was looking around going, you know, who will challenge Starlink? And the only one that is spending on a system as massive and as formidable right now as Amazon's Project Hyper. Yeah, so we saw some images just coming down an hour or two ago as we record this of the actual deployment because it was failed in secrecy from ULA, like it was a DoD launch or something.

I don't know, maybe they had some other payload on there that they didn't want us to see in the way that some of the Starlink launches have had star shields. I doubt it. The buses look like arrows, like the one web bus. Is it just like, it's a nice shape to put a bunch around a circle and it kind of gets that trapezoid shape? What do you make of that? I was surprised when I saw, yeah, they look like bigger beefier versions of the one web satellite. And they do have that same kind of like honeycomb or port on the cob.

There you go. I like that. They're all there in the summer here. They go into space. I mean, I guess there's so few constellations that are deployed right now. We've really got just two main examples of how you get them out there. There's the flat set design that SpaceX and Rocket Lab have gone for. And then there's this corn on the cob. I'm going to double down on that. I love it. Yeah, keep it going.

This design that OneWeb has gone for and now Amazon has gone for to get these satellites out there and make sure that they deploy in a way where like, it's stable. You know, one of the things I'll give a shameless plug for the book that I'm writing on OneWeb. One of the things that I found interesting they had to figure out, because nobody at that time had deployed that many satellites before, was how do you release them without introducing shock? Every time you deploy it, you'd inject a little bit of shock into the upper stage and you don't want to rattle it so much that you...

as things start to go bad. Break something, yeah. Yeah. So they were like, do we use pyrotechnics? Do we use non-explosives? I think they ended up with what they called non-explosive actuators. Just kind of like safely do it, but like it was a real rocket science question to be like, okay, you got so many of these things, they can't hit each other,

they can't hit the rocket, like you got to find a way to like make it so that the weight is stable across the whole thing. There's just a lot of behind the scenes engineering that goes into making it. So I'm not surprised that there was a common denominator for like, how do you do this? And so far, it's one of two ways. Yeah, totally. I this makes me think, I don't know why I thought you wouldn't talk about the book, because now I realize you are writing about it openly as well. But yeah, you should find whoever that person was that designed the release mechanism and get their reaction the first time they watched the Starlink launch that we had video where the upper stage spun up and flung the entire stack of Starlink satellites off into orbit, like a completely chaotic way. I would like a live reaction to that video

because it is still one of the most hilarious satellite deployment videos I've ever seen. I'll go and ask some people. I can say that the 1010 launch from the smattering of people that I spoke to didn't seem to really spook the folks at OneWeb because SpaceX didn't even raise the orbits of those satellites and they were so big that it seems like OneWeb would have been able to launch more satellites per rocket than SpaceX under the original Tintin design and

Then when they just dropped that and came out with the flat set those Everyone was spooked. They shook. Yeah On the Kuiper side of things how have you assessed like their approach now that they are getting actual launches underway I feel like we've heard okay. This is more of like a AWS side service that Amazon is going to run, very like professional business class, industrial in a way that isn't competing on the consumer end. Does that feel like the same thing that you said about the Starlink? You know, critics isn't the right word, but like doubters of like, oh, it's just a consumer system. Does that feel like a way to tack into that wind of like, well, they're just consumers, so we'll be all the other stuff? Or does that

actually feel like the strategy they're going for? No, I would say Kuiper is going straight for the consumer market. They are the only ones that I've seen talk directly about competing with Starlink on price. They rolled out their user terminals and said, this is what was it? It was like $400, I think. What I see Kyper doing is looking for all of the ways that the constellation can enhance the connectivity services that Amazon offers, basically expanding through things like consumer and then your usual cast of markets, you know, Aero, maritime government, but then also plugging into the AWS cloud

and make you can so that cloud connectivity can be reached in areas that maybe it wasn't possible to do so before or not with as much ease. You know, we saw, I want to, that Starlink had signed data center contracts with Microsoft and Google Cloud, I think. So it was not a surprise if they figured, hey, if we can get connectivity to remote cloud sites, that really enhances the internet. And then Amazon has offered their own, basically their own version of the internet. You don't technically have to touch the public internet because you can go from a Kuiper user terminal to a Kuiper satellite

to a Kuiper ground station at AWS data center and just have your own very secure network. One of the things that I heard from a buddy that worked at Kuiper was that it was one of the most integrated networks they'd ever seen. I think one of the reasons that satellite networks are so challenging is you can get these bespoke pieces from... If you're a traditional satellite operator, you might buy your satellite from one company. Like say you bought your satellite from Boeing. Maybe you buy your ground segment gear from Hughes or Galat, and then you've got your user terminals from the cast of characters around the

US and Europe. Each of those has to be taught to work with each other. And so that introduces complexity into your network. That makes the rollout of it slower and this can drive up costs. The Kuiper network from what I've heard is like very, like you've got the same chip, satellite, user terminal, gateway,

everything knows how to talk to itself. They'll speak the same language. And so you end up with like a very powerful network, which is really interesting. I'm curious what it's going to look like when they start practicing service and rolling it out. On the one hand, you've got all these things that say, hey, this looks like it's going to be a really strong service. And then on the other hand, you've got that recent Bloomberg article

that said that they were slow on production, and not that that's uncommon for new constellations, but part of the reason that they were blamed, one of the reasons attributed to the tardiness in production is that they've tried to put such a high-tech design out there right from the beginning. We remember the first Starlink satellites didn't have cross-links. They were much simpler satellites than the V2 mini optimized version that they're launching today. And when I've seen companies, this is more so in like geostationary land, but when they launch like a really big advanced satellite, sometimes they spend like half a year in calibration and getting it configured.

And that learning curve can be really steep. So I, I don't know where they land. Like they could get this, they could launch them and have them up and running in like a month, couple of months, or maybe the learning curve is going to be so steep because they put so much high tech stuff out there that it's closer to a half a year or more. Stuff out there that it's close to a half a year or more. It's interesting to try to figure out on the scale of like total long shot to inevitable where you would grade paper right cuz i think there's arguments both ways on one hand it feels like. the more the launch side market where SpaceX is so far ahead and they have such an advantage because of the fact that they got there so early and they've done so well in terms of

execution that they're so far ahead of the industry and everybody's waiting for the second player to show up and actually drive prices down. I don't even know when we're going to see it on the launch side of the market, but you know, are we going to have that same thing on the communication side as well? On the other hand, like you saying it's it's Amazon after all like They have the scale to pull something like this off. They have infrastructure in place They run half the internet for Christ's sake like they have the right pieces there to actually become the inevitable answer to that

I Can't decide which end of that spectrum wins out like it's probably it's not cleanly one way or the other in my mind. I just don't know which way the needle should be pulling in my head. I still lean towards them being an inevitability. I think that they're going to be here. Like you said, they're very well capitalized. I think that they've got a lot of in-house talent. the manufacturing's in-house, the user terminal's in-house, they can leverage a lot of AWS. The only piece that still, for whatever reason,

they haven't vertically integrated is the launch side. And I think that's the hard part. I want to say, is it Jack? I'm liking his last name at Payload, just posted something earlier today where they did a back of the envelope, The hard part, I want to say, was it Jack? I'm liking his last name at Payload. Just like posted something earlier today where they did a sort of a back of the envelope

the assessment of the launch costs and Starlink they had at like $500,000-ish per satellite and Kuiper at like 2.4. So, you know, one's almost five times as expensive. It's just cause it's not vertically integrated. I think the thing that makes Kuiper hard is if they can't control the costs. And when we at Quilty did our own report on Kuiper, we had estimated that the constellation would cost like 16 and a half to $20 billion, not 10, like their original estimate.

And the biggest, like half of that is the launch cost, just because of how much they have to spend on third party rockets. And then those rockets, you know, like ARION 6 needs upgrades, they get the P-160 booster that I think is just going into testing now, ULA, saying, building another system for them effectively. Hold on the ground system and they've got to re certify Vulcan because the Leo optimized Centaur upper stage is like so different. You know, great for Kuiper. But to me, that looks like they had to introduce new changes on the rocket.

I don't know if there were any new changes for blue, but these satellites are so comparatively big and the launch demands are so high that like they've had a forcing change on most of the launch industry. I'm sure that's not cheap. Yeah, it's, it's easy for me to chalk up and look at like what Amazon invests in things and be like, man, it's kind of feels like a rounding error to them of just in terms of an Amazon scale. But

you're right that like, you know, when launch cost is half, that's pretty staggering when you try to figure out that business on its own. Now that's how much can they blend it through what they already do elsewhere and make that problem go away by, you know, immersing it in the scale of the rest of Amazon and AWS specifically. But I don't know, that's fuzzy math to do at best. The internal Quilty debate right now is over how many Kuiper launches are going to happen this year. I think I said seven. I don't know what the latest numbers. We've got an office bet going.

I got to go back. I did the show like a couple of months ago trying to count that. I got to figure out where I landed on. I probably was around your number of like two from each. And if you're lucky, another one gets off. But I don't know. I forget. I must have done this. Like, maybe this was almost last summer because I was like, they got two years effectively. And none of these vehicles are flying

To any any extent yet. So and they wasted an atlas five was just two satellites the first time around which also felt I Want to ask you about one thing? About the starlink RF snooping thing. I know you were more focused on the hypersonic side, but you at least tweeted about it So it feels like fair game to ask you about this focus on the hypersonic side, but you at least tweeted about it. So it feels like fair game to ask you about this. So if I am to understand correctly, SpaceX use their satellites as deployed to get a sense of Echo Star specifically and how they're using their spectrum on across certain areas

of the US effectively? Maybe North America generally, I forget exactly what. And then complain about it? What was the then what on that storyline? Yeah, so when it comes to who gets to use what spectrum, the endless arguing, and this isn't just between SpaceX and EchoStar, it's between satellite operators broadly and even between the satellite industry and like your terrestrial connectivity industry is are you really using that? It's kind of like, you know, hey, you're

going to eat all that. Yeah. So like this debate is going on constantly in the industry and somebody is always saying you don't look like you're going to eat all that. And then the other party is saying like, hands off my plate, this is all mine. And that's what's happened. And then people hire third party consultants or they try to do these studies to say, it doesn't really look like you're using all that spectrum. I think what SpaceX did that was unique and novel was taking the Starlink satellites and basically turning them into radio frequency mappers and saying, hey, we can prove with our fleet that you are not in fact using all the spectrum.

And if you're not using it all, then hey, regulator, how do we put this to better use? And that is really interesting, like this idea of orbital wash dogs. I do think that for the argument to be most compelling, it probably needs to be done by a third party. So I think if SpaceX was able to pay, and I don't even know if this is within their set of frequencies, but somebody like a Hawkeye 360 or an Aurora InSight to go and map this out and figure out what is the actual density of spectrum that's being used. It could have a more interesting impact. But the spectrum is the lifeblood of the satellite industry.

It's the lifeblood of constellations. And the more you can get your hands on, the more capable network you can design. So surely they're going to keep looking for more and try to figure out ways that they can get a hold of it to make Starlink more powerful. Is there any sense that maybe not just SpaceX, but the industry generally feels like the, um, the guidelines or the enforcement that's in place in terms of like the timelines of rollouts and when you get, you know, when you get awarded that spectrum, you have so long to use it and you have to use it to a certain extent to retain it. Is there feeling like those rules are written for the, the geo market of, you

know, 20 years ago or something like that, and that they need to be changed and tweaked for the modern era or does have there been those changes that everyone's fine with and this is more of just like needling your competitors on the margins. No, I think there is that feeling that the rules are old and some of them have held and some have not. SpaceX would certainly be in the camp of these rules are old and here are ways that we can improve them for next gen systems. I think your geostationary operators, a lot of them are going to have a different take. And we see this play out at the FCC in the dockets where they argue back and forth about how to make use of the spectrum. I think this is getting interesting as we move into

direct-to-device and everybody trying to put up a direct-to-device constellation where the spectrum is really critical to deciding what quality of service you can offer, how fast you can offer it, and where. Those are all very big things. So I don't know if I answered your question there, but I think, yeah, there's changes, but it's not going to be as easy as flipping a switch. There's still camps that believe fervently in whatever their spectrum policy is, and they're going to continue to argue for it. I think the FCC right now does have sort of a forward leaning take. You know, they've got like a docket right now that's just called delete, delete,

delete. And it's for companies to come in and say, hey, what regulations should we delete? As the name suggests. So they have decided to take a look at the paperwork. And they're not the first FCC to do that. I think over basically this whole constellation boom, the FCC has been forced to take a step back and say, are these policies the right ones? And as the space industry grows, they keep looking and saying, are these policies the right ones? So I do feel like the FCC has been pretty forward leaning over the past eight or so years to make those changes.

It's just continuing. Yeah. All right. Last thing I want to ask you about, because I don't want to keep you too late on a Friday afternoon. There's this other presence in the constellations industry, which is some flow chart from Apple to Global Star to Rocket Lab to NBA, this like kind of amorphous thing going on that I had some crack pot theory a couple of weeks ago about like, you know, this is another player in the game that may or may not exist someday. What do you make of that whole side?

Is it as limited a scale as announced, which is like just the satellite connectivity for iPhones? Is this harmless thing over here? Or, you know, Rocket Lab keeps talking about their own constellation. Are these the same plan? And we're about to see some masterful chess moves from also another very heavily resourced company in Apple? So I can't remember the specifics of your theory. I do remember hearing it. It's not even worth it. It's not worth going on. I think that was it, really, was that Rocket Lab talking about their own constellation. What they really mean is a constellation that's in partnership with this whole stack of companies that ultimately results in direct to iPhone services and that being a huge force because Apple's got the money. And I think the incentive

to you say like, you know, there's such a privacy minded company, what you're talking about earlier with Amazon of going, you know, Kuiper sat to Kuiper terminal to Amazon ground station. That's like the most Apple selling thing I could imagine iPhone to an Apple satellite to an Apple data center and nothing ever reaches outside of that and encrypted, yada yada, great Apple selling point. But is this even in the cards, I think was my crackpot theory. great Apple selling point, but is this even in the cards? I think was my crackpot theory. It's a compelling theory. I unfortunately I don't know that it holds that much water and I would point to the fact that Global Star has yet to and looks like they will not execute on the contract option that they had with Rocket Lab and MDA. Or I want to say it was an additional nine satellites.

So they ordered, going from memory, 17 satellites from the combination of Rocket Lab and MDA with the option to increase that to 26. Those 17 are progressing pretty cleanly, based off of MDA and Rocket Lab are both public companies. And so I feel like we've got some pretty good visibility into how that program is going. But yeah, there's been no movement. Instead, GlobalStar went and purchased a second set of around 50 satellites from MDA to really bulk up that constellation and make it something, to really bulk up that constellation and make it something, I think it's going to be close to like an Iridium Next sized fleet. Remember serves me right. So that looks like they've gone in a separate direction. Meanwhile, Rocket Lab is still talking and Peter Beck, you know, earnings calls now, being less shy about the fact that they want to have their own constellation and do their own services. And I think he's ruled out Earth observation, because he

at some point he gave a talk about this and said that he didn't want to go into something that's overcrowded or small market. And Earth observation is both of those things. So that probably does put his attention into telecom land. And you know, this flat sets look pretty similar to another constellation that's out there. Other circles. Yeah. A little bit.

But, no, I'm curious to see what Rocket Lab does. I do think it'll be in the telecom space. I know that they've been thinking real hard about it. What's interesting, I think that for satellites, like Rocket Lab has acquired a whole bunch of the pieces, that's kind of old news, like they got Solero, they got reaction wheels and all this stuff, but the hardest part of a satellite to build is consistently the payload.

So I'd be really curious to see how they go about that because to me, it looks like, A, they would have to do another acquisition and the hotshot on the market, SatxFi, was just purchased by MDA, so they're gone. Or they'd have to build up that talent in-house. And I did a quick perusal like very quick so it wasn't detailed but I did a quick perusal of their job board and I didn't see them hiring for a bunch of RF engineers so for them to have that I guess they'd

have to buy it but maybe maybe does maybe Apple does buy into my crackpot theory. Maybe it's Apple. I don't know. It's almost as if one of us two knows a bunch of people that works at Apple and could ask people questions if anyone they know does RF work. It's a question for after this episode. So all right buddy well I appreciate you hanging out and becoming a hypersonics nerd. So you're now the hypersonics guy as well as the constellation guy for Miko. So congratulations. I look forward to it. Yeah.

What do you want to plug before you're out of here? The book? Do you want anyone to follow along with the substack and all that kind of stuff? Sure. Yeah, that's it. The book is on its way. I've written 150 pages. I think it's going to end up somewhere between 250 and 300.

So it's coming along if you like constellations. And even if you don't know the One-Width story that well, or that maybe it's not the one you would think of first, people who read this will learn a lot about what it's like to build a constellation. And you'll even understand, you'll understand Starlink better, you'll and you'll even understand, you'll understand Starlink better, you'll understand Kuiper better, you'll understand what nations are. We didn't even get into the conversation about sovereign constellations like Germany wanting their own or the EU, but anybody who wants to build a constellation is going to learn a ton from this book or just how the sausage is made.

Quilty Space, we're doing the research on constellations, typersonics, anything people are spending money on when it comes to space. So plug for that. And thanks for having me on the show. It's always fun to be here. Am I allowed to tell them that I read 100 pages of your book and it kicks ass? And I'm dying for the other 150? Yeah, I think you're allowed to tell them that you read a hundred pages of the book, the draft manuscript, and I appreciate your feedback. You were not paid to give

that endorsement here. But yeah, I had a small number of people who I had to test read it because I wanted to make sure that the tone was good, that the book flowed well before I went and wrote the rest. And I appreciate you laying eyes on it. Feedback has been very good, which makes me feel really confident in telling this story. And I don't think that there are enough books about satellite operators. Like, I love rockets as much as the next guy, but they put satellites up in space. And there's just so much, for me,

there was so much palace intrigue between how that got done and I think that people are going to find it to be really juicy, really interesting. There's a lot of good hot gossip in this book. A lot of hot gossip. It's so good. It's so good. All right, man. Thanks so much for hanging out. Appreciate it it man.