Main Engine Cut Off - T+331: Checking in on K2 (with Neel Kunjur, Co-Founder and CTO)

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Neel Kunjur, Co-Founder and CTO of K2 Space, joins me to talk about their hardware in space today, how their vision and plans have evolved over the past few years, and how industry changes like the push for orbital data centers have impacted their future. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Lee, Steve, Josh from Impulse, Kris, David, Miles O’Brien, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Jan, Donald, Frank, Better Every Day Studios, Stealth Julian, The Astrogators at SEE, Ryan, Matt, Warren, Will and Lars from Agile, Pat, Fred, Joonas, Theo and Violet, Russell, Joel, Natasha Tsakos, Joakim, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics High-Power Satellite Platforms | K2 Space | Build Bigger T+270: K2 Space (with Neel Kunjur, Co-Founder and CTO) - Main Engine Cut Off Investors commit quarter-billion dollars to startup designing “Giga” satellites - Ars Technica Episode 241 - Maybe the Denver Airport (with Andrew Rush) - Off-Nominal Anduril teams with commercial space firms, Sandia lab on Golden Dome interceptor program - SpaceNews Space Force taps K2 satellites to test laser communications for missile-defense - SpaceNews The Show Like the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack! Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Follow @[e-mail] on Mastodon Listen to MECO Headlines Listen to Off-Nominal Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Artwork photo by NASA/Bill Ingalls Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony McElangelo, and I've got a returning guest with us today. Neil Cunger, the co-founder and CTO over at K2 Space. He and his brother founded the company, and Neil was on the show over two years ago at this point. A lot has changed in their segment in the market. You know, big power-hungry satellites have become all the rage. Things have changed a lot. They've launched himself to space. There's a lot to catch up on. I thought they were being left out of a lot of coverage about the orbital data center moment that we're having, the big powerful satellite moment. Didn't hear a lot of K2 talk.

Thought we should. Thought it was a good time to check back in on what they're working on. So really fun conversation coming your way. Let's give Neil a call. Neil, welcome back. It's been over two years, as we have now discovered,

which used to not be that long of a time, but in now in space years, man, it feels like a decade. That's multiple space startup lifetimes, I think, in our space. It's definitely true. It's definitely true. It's a while.

Yeah. And trends in the industry. You know, have come and gone, probably. Maybe, I don't know if any have gone. Other than, like, suborbital tourism that almost sort of went. Yeah, I think I think most of them have had staying power. I think we were maybe a little bit more contrarian back then than we are now, which is always a nice thing, a nice feeling.

But, yeah, two years changes a lot. Well, that's, and that's exactly why I was like, it feels like the right time to get y'all back on, because there's been a lot of conversations the industry. And every time I'm like, I feel like they're leaving K2 out of this stuff. story. And, you know, there's at least two people that have been talking to me about exactly the path that we're heading down as an industry. So, yeah, do you feel like people have not been talking about you as much in these media write-ups as they should be? Or was that just my bias as being someone who likes you guys? Yeah, my brother and I kind of set a general stance of like, we're going to put our heads down, build it and point up to it when it's up in the sky, right? At the end of the day, in my opinion, that's what matters, right? Like, there's a lot of of cartoon satellites out there, a lot of PowerPoint satellites and PowerPoint engineering. But for us, we were heads down on our mission, which just recently launched successfully,

and focusing on that because to me, that's the ultimate proof point, right? It's one thing to build a QSAT or a microsat, but if you're talking about building bigger and you really, really want to put your money where your mouth is, you've got to launch something big, right? And so now we've done that. We're starting to raise our heads a little bit, talk about it a little bit more. But even still, I think, you know, from our perspective, we've been pretty bold. about where we think the industry should head, where we think physics says we should go.

And if others want to follow along on that trend, right, like happy, happy to see others join us on the journey, but we're going to put our heads down and build for sure. Yeah, and, you know, like you said, you got harder, we're in space now. So that's, that's always a huge milestone to get to. And it doesn't, it feels like the announcements of stuff that you've been working on, contracts, agreements, everything has really been not necessarily tied to that in the way that you see other companies where they hit this big, you know, we launched a thing,

that was a big gate to get over, and then they announced a whole tranche of contracts. You guys weren't necessarily, like, did that speak to your confidence in that this was going well, that you were talking about it as you were building the thing the whole time? Yeah, I think there was a level of trust

that the customers had in the team. You know, they knew that, you know, regardless of the outcome of this first mission, that we would achieve the objective that we set out to achieve. And so the mission, while it's definitely reassuring for a lot of our customers,

that we did what we said we would do, wasn't ultimately a gate to them, you know, providing commitments, financial commitments, contractual commitments to joining us on our journey. And I think the second piece is, you know, what we were building was so unique and so critical to a lot of these architectures on the commercial and national security side

that, you know, the uniqueness plus confidence in team was enough, I think, to get a lot of people over that, that ledge of, you know, betting on a company that hasn't flown their full satellite yet. And we had building steps along the way, right? We had the mission last year where we flew a lot of the hardware and proved some of the technology out. But there's no substitute for a full satellite. And so we were excited that a lot of those customers trusted us and also excited to make them look good.

You always want to make your customers look good at the end of the day and prove them right. And so a lot of those people that took those early bets on us are feeling pretty good now. And with the launch behind us, I think it's opening up a lot more customers as well. Like you can imagine that there were definitely floodgates, even though we were able to get some of those contracts, right, with just not having heritage yet. Now that we have that, we can definitely move forward pretty confidently in expanding the business. How do you feel like this is kind of the perfect bookend of this phase of the company? I like to talk to people where you guys were the last time, where you had this really strong vision, you had the initial roadmap in front

of you. You had a facility. You showed me where it was going to be laid out. And now we are past that first kind of learning cycle where you've built a thing, you've attracted certain customers. I'm sure the conversations you've had with different customers that have either signed or not signed have changed a couple things internally. But the big piece that if you roll back two years and listen, you know, we're talking about post-Starship future. I don't think you or I would have bet that we are still in the pre-starship future. And now, you know, there's even been talked recently of the way the Artemis Roadmap shaving out that the commercial launch starship future is still another two years away. So has that influenced anything about the day-to-day

and the specific hardware you're rolling out now? Or is the trend still right for you that bigger is better and we'll get there in the launch vehicles? Like, is that stressful? Because you guys said Starship a lot when you're starting this business and it's still not here. I think Starship was ultimately the North Star, right? Like if you think about launch capacity and where we think it's heading,

I don't think anything has changed there. And from our perspective, we wanted to build a business that was great in a world without Starship and gets even better in a world with Starship. And two years ago, we were already kind of putting those pieces in play with pretty much all of the contracts that we've announced, all the contracts that we're working on right now are leveraging Falcon 9 and Falcon 9's ties vehicles, right? So I think our business has been doing really great in the pre-Starship world, and we're still excited for

Starship. Like, don't get me wrong, some of the platforms we want to work on, some of the concepts, especially when you get up to the 100 kilowatt scale, they do mandate either a New Glen or Starship size faring. And even SpaceX themselves, right, is sort of doing this for that reason. And so we're definitely excited about that future and our technology definitely heads in that direction. But in terms of timeline, we've become relatively desensitized to the timeline of Starship, which was buy intent, right? I think we didn't want to build a business. You know, you always want to build a business that is, you know, true if SpaceX achieves what they say they're going to achieve, but not dependent on the timeline of SpaceX is they're going to do something. I think Elon himself will say like it's not a matter of

if, it's when, right? And, you know, I truly believe that about everything that SpaceX does. Yeah, I've had my moments, but yeah. I mean, it still feels that way to me. And honestly, sometimes I wonder if the troubles that SpaceX had through 2025, like if that all syncs them up with the rest of the industry's timeline, that might be good because they're going to phase out Falcon 9 before anyone really put cost pressure on Falcon 9. And that isn't healthy when I'm looking at the industry as a, you know, unbiased observer. we all want that other bit of pressure.

And, you know, that's for your part of the business segment. That is really important because there's starship flies and they're selling it for the same price, Falcon 9 is, and that doesn't really change anything on the economic scale. And there's no reason for them to do that unless others in the industry step up. So you're right in that like your business model isn't dependent on that, but it is made better if the other competitors do better too. If you're all directionally correct and the rest of the industry follows as well, and this Starship and K2 just tend to be a model of rocket payload,

but there's other people that want to serve that, that makes your thing even better. That is the flywheel you're looking for down the line. I think there's a massive demand signal as well, right? So you have this incredible demand signal from the industry for more launch capacity. And, you know, we know from a physics and engineering perspective, it's possible, right? SpaceX has proved that. Many launchers have proven that.

And so I think it's been harder for some of those other providers to really catch up. But we're starting to see some of them get closer and closer, right, every year. And I think the more launch capacity there is the better for us. But right now, you know, when we build out the business, especially when we forecast out, like, what would we use Starship for when we get to that stage where it's operational? We're actually assuming no price reduction, right? We're not necessarily assuming that SpaceX is going to massively price Starship differently than Falcon 9. And I think if you can show that you have a viable business and an excellent business in a world where they don't reduce the cost of Starship necessarily, you're going to be in a great spot. If you're dependent on them to, you know, go orders of magnitude lower on cost, then, yeah, you're not only waiting on the timeline of Starship, but you're waiting on the timeline of the next best competitor as well.

And so we didn't want to build our business around that. We wanted to focus on Falcon 9 today and then building a business that when Starship is available, all we're relying on is not necessarily cost, but to change the types of spacecraft that we can put inside of the volume of the fair end. And so that's how we view Starship. Okay, that gets us over to the application side of things, where, you know, the thing that I feel like you've been being left out of is the orbital data center trend of late. You know, industry is a lot different now. In a lot of ways, I'm like at the vertex of this, whereas, like, you know, half my life is making software and I'm like the biggest user of these models that are getting trained. And then the other half of my life is talking about orbital data centers. So I am fully consumed by this topic at the moment. No one quite foresaw this particular,

I think we knew we were going here, but I don't think people saw the fact that everyone is going here at the same time and that there is a land rush to some extent in orbit, but also the size that this demands from power drawl sounds a lot more like the conversations you've had on this show than others. So how have you felt about that push in the industry? How does K2 fit in here? Yeah, it's kind of funny because the 100-kil-watt satellite

was actually the first one that I drew up, right? Like four years ago when we started K2, I think I told you this when we were on the show that like, we were full send on building the giga, right, our 100 kilowatt class satellite. And, you know, so we sized it. We did a lot of the early design work for it. And ultimately what we did is we said, okay, we're going to build 100 kilowatt satellite.

What are the things that we want to use, you know, in a 20 kilowatt satellite to take a step towards it, right? So that's why we actually went with a 20 kilowatt haul thruster, designed a lot of our subsystems, specifically thinking about the 100, kyl watt sizing point in mind. And it was funny because back then everybody told us we were crazy, right? Like who would want 100 kilowatt satellite? Like there's no payloads designed to use 100 kilowatt satellite. And we were like, just you wait. Like, you know, we will get there and we will be one of the

first. So ultimately, it's kind of indicating to see that that is actually the sizing point that people are gravitating towards. It shows that, you know, the hand calcs that I did four years ago were the right hand calms. But in terms of our place within sort of the overall data center space, the way that My brother and I view it is, like, there is no way that you can do true orbital data centers without really committing. Like, you don't put up 10 small sats and kind of put your toe in the water, right? Like, and even any number of small sats will not get you to a meaningful level of compute, right? To get to a meaningful level of compute, you have to have a massive amount of power.

That dollar per watt and that watt per kilogram needs to be pretty well optimized. And you need to be, you know, designing for manufacturing scale from the very, very beginning. And I think that those are things that we've done from the very start, right? So you can bet, even though we haven't announced it publicly, like we are at the heart of all of those discussions with a lot of the large players that are looking at taking that step into the orbital data center space. But I think that you need to be building the foundational technology and you cannot get there incrementally. You cannot build like a one kilowatt satellite, then build a five kilowatt satellite and then 100 kilowatt satellite. You need to rethink the entire technology stack from the ground up, which is exactly. what we started K2 to do, right? And I think, you know, that that will allow us to have a little bit of a

head start, but we're expecting that, you know, everybody should be putting investment into this space. I mean, you and I and other people who have been, you know, waiting for that flywheel that kind of spurs the next generation of space investment. I'm pretty excited personally, right? Like, I think this is a massive flywheel opportunity for the entire industry where you have something that is becoming, you know, integral to the fabric of everybody's daily life. being limited terrestrially, right? And, you know, we can get into the debates of like, you know, if you model a terrestrial data center, like, what's the break-even point for an orbital data center? But at the end of the day, I think there's a lot of very smart people who have pretty strong

conviction that it's not a matter of cost parity. It's a matter of can you even do it, right? Like, if you assume that you cannot even build a one gigawatt, you know, a terrestrial data center anymore, right, because of either, you know, energy reasons or regulatory reasons or public sentiment reasons. The cost equation doesn't need to be parity anymore. Yeah, you're not doing math at that point. You're doing politics and social science. You're like, I'm not going to do math. I'm just going to go build it, right? And so, you know, that's kind of been some of our sentiment as well from the very beginning is that, you know, we're going to focus on optimizing around the physics, around the watt per kilogram, the dollar per watt. And we know that'll open up a lot of interesting

business cases, including orbital data centers being one of them. And so it's nice to have like pretty strong exposure to that industry, right? But, you know, at the end of the day, we are still going to maintain the megaclass platform. Like we're building a massive commercial and national security business, you know, in the 20 kilowatt scale with Falcon 9. And the 100 kilowatt giga is kind of, you know, what we're all starting to work on next, right, as we think about the larger launch vehicles. Man, I have about eight ways I need to go based on that answer. But you mentioned, you know, why would anyone ever use 100 kilowatt satellite? If you ever are someone that finds yourself asking a question of why would anyone stop and put that sentence down and go a different direction?

A good argument is this doesn't seem physically possible for the environment I'm operating in a spin launch. Like that seems pretty good on the moon, but I'm not seeing it on Earth. Or, you know, the amount of satellites you might need in particular orbital plane and the size of the solar arrays. We can do some math on that. But why would anyone ever is never a good track? And that is for power consumption, that is for storage on a computer, that is for computers everywhere. Like, humans have always put computers everywhere we possibly can, and we found really good things to do with it. So a lot of the concern out there of, well, what are we going to do with all these data centers?

I'm like, I bet we'll figure out some uses because we're really good at using computers to do a lot of useful and interesting things. And it becomes a huge segment of the economy. And the future isn't just today, but a little bit different. there's step changes that happen because we unlock things that we can do with our time because we've stopped doing other things with our time. We used to all be farmers in the country

and then now we are not. There's very few farmers in the country and the society moves on in that way and the way that space hooks into that, I think we've always seen moments of this where it's like oh, communications is the thing and then that kind of went away and then we're like, oh shit, but this communication, this is the one.

And it's like, yeah, Starlink is great, you know, and there's competitors to it. And so space kind of has these false starts where you get these huge investment cycles and things back off and cool off for a little bit. You know, I think two years ago, people were listening and could only reach for, you know, the SES type constellations that have 20 satellites in MEO. That's maybe not expansive enough thinking about what we could do with power in space. So that's why I've always been intrigued because you are aiming in the direction of the things that are always the areas of society that grow. and I'm buying that. Whether or not you want to debate particular applications,

I'm buying the directional growth of humanity in that. But that doesn't mean that we can't talk about the actual implementation details there. Yeah, and I think, you know, at the end of the day, I said this before, I think people like fundamentally got the Moore's Law of Space wrong, right? Like, you know, they tried to equate it to the Moore's Law Terrestrily, which is like, okay, we can do more with less, right? more with less power, more compute for a given, you know, die size and note size and power draw, et cetera. But that, you know, while that sort of analogy applies to restially, it's actually

different when you think about what the true Moore's law of space is. The true Moore's law of space is driven by mass, right? And we should be doing more with more, right? And it should always, there's always a reason to do more with more mass, right, when it comes to space applications. And I found that a lot of the people back when we were starting that, you know, we're kind of making those opinionated statements that, like, you shouldn't need more power or you shouldn't need more mass or what payloads out there exist, there's a heavy overlap between those people and the people who can't build the technology to actually scale up, right? So everybody tries to find a reason to justify their technology approach. But at the end of the day, what I've always felt is that

if physics justifies your technology approach, then you don't need to defend it, right? And if physics says that, like, we want more power and we want more aperture and we want larger systems, right? then we should listen to that, right? Instead of trying to reverse engineer our way into taking a design decision back to a philosophy, right? That's good. Okay, so talk me through why, you know, you said you can't start small scale and then work your way up. Is there a moment where the systems become so totally different that there's just no applicability at a smaller size? Like, where is that line?

Where are you in your approach to it? What is that jump like? Yeah, I think the lessons that you live, learn and don't learn are what matter, right? So when you're at the small scale, there's a lot of things that you just never encounter. Regardless of how hard you try to learn from your small satellite, you'll just never encounter the physical phenomena that will challenge you when you scale up. So like one great example is say you want to build a 100 kilowatt satellite. Most small satellites operate at a relatively low voltage, say like a 28-volt

bus. That's a pretty common industry standard. At 28 volts when you're flying in a space environment, which a lot of people don't appreciate this is, yes, it's a vacuum, but there's also a a plasma. And plasma is a dangerous thing for high-voltage spacecraft. When you're flying at 28 bolts, you never actually have to encounter any of the mitigations for arcing and how to design power systems to be resilient to that. The moment you cross, like, 70-80 volts, it starts to become a problem. The moment you push above 200, it starts to become intractable, right? And that's where you almost have to do, like, fundamentally different technology to be able to solve some of the challenges that you encounter when you scale up in power. And you have to go to those higher

voltages to operate at these higher powers, right? I think if you were to try to do a 28-fold, 100-kilowatt satellite, you'd end up with more copper than satellite at the end of the day just to be able to handle all that current. And again, like as a small satellite developer, you just never encounter that. Another great example that people I think will appreciate is, you know, if you're a small satellite that say like one kilowatts or less, and that's what you've flown, you can do that with like a body-mounted solar array or relatively fixed panel solar ray, right? And those are fairly easy. You may not even need a deployment mechanism to be able to deploy your solar air to generate that level of power.

But when you scale up in size, you know, to the 20 kilowatt scale or even beyond, you have these gigantic systems that are huge and floppy and manufacturing them as hard, flying them is hard. The dynamics and attitude control around them are very hard, right? And those are things that you just never encounter. You never model them. You never try to solve those problems because you're just operating at a much smaller scale. And so it was always our belief that, you know, we need to go learn the hard lessons, right? And we need to learn those lessons that are sort of the impediments to scaling the size of the spacecraft. And that's why we started with 20 kilowatts.

We're like, we had multiple people come and ask us to build a five kilowatt or two or three kilowatt satellite first. And we're like, if we do that, sure, we might have an early customer. But, you know, we will never learn those really foundational lessons that are important to scaling. And through gravitas on orbit now, we're learning those lessons every day, right? And you can bet that those lessons are going straight into the design of our next satellites in a way that I think you can only get if you've actually launched one. So are there other physical challenges like that? It's like the double there? What's it the physical challenge?

Double there? Sometimes I stumble in that phrase. Are there more of those to be found up towards the hundred? Or, you know, and do you already know them? Or are those unknowns at this point? Yeah, you can bet there are. And some of them we've anticipated, right? So I mentioned the 20 kilowatt haul thruster.

Obviously, once you scale up to that size, you know, getting around maneuvering, going to the orbit that you ultimately want to go to stationkeeping disposal, those all become immense challenges. And so we actually oversized our thruster a little bit. And doing so, opened up some really unique capabilities with how we get to MEO on the megaclass satellite. But we anticipated that challenge and said, okay, we're going to force ourselves to learn that lesson early, right?

Like rather than start with a smaller haul thruster, we're going to learn that lesson today. I think another big one that is, you know, very much underappreciated by anybody who's never designed satellite before is thermal, right? When it comes to high power satellite design, it's actually not about the power. You start with thermal. You do your sort of napkin math that tells you how big the radiative surface area needs to be, and then you back your way into a structural design that supports that. And so, you know, at 20 kilowatts, we encounter that for sure, right? You know, when you're pushing, you know, upwards of anywhere from seven, eight to 11 kilowatts of dissipation, you're outside of the realm where you can just, you know, sort of use maybe small composite panels and it's just all okay, which is a small satellite very much is a simpler thermal challenge.

So you need to do pretty extreme things, but at 100 kilowatts, it becomes even more extreme, right? And so we are starting to pull forward a lot of our technology development for the 100 kilowatt satellite and launching it on our own opportunities that we have now very regularly. We're launching several, several satellites and several launches per year. So we have the opportunity to do a lot of that tech development. Because our satellite is so big, because we designed it to host a lot of payload mass and have a lot of power, we can use that payload mass and power for other people's payloads, or we can use them for our own, right, to do tech dev on the 100 kilowatt satellite.

So I think that's the advantage that we have. And again, it's all about pulling forward those really hard lessons early enough so that you don't necessarily need to learn them on your first launch of your 100 kilowatt satellite. So all of the LinkedIn posts and medium articles and everybody that's got their opinion on why orbital data centers are or are not possible, when you read those, because those are framed around the orbital data center debate, but I think they are probably things that would have had K2 on their headline year or two back. What of those criticisms or arguments do you find valid and concern you? And what are the other ones that you kind of say, no, no, not a problem. Like we have a pathway for that. Yeah, I think the valid, the most valid point is definitely the launch point, right? It's, it's a very, you know, you do the math on what it takes to actually field, you know, gigawatt class orbital data center and launch costs become a huge, huge driver, right? And so you either need to address that by, you know, in SpaceX's way, owning a launch vehicle or introducing technology that allows you to reduce launch cost, right? And so, you know, there's a few ways to do that. I won't go into too much detail there, but you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, to have an answer for why you think that, like, from a launch cost perspective, you can keep it

at a reasonable amount to justify the investment. I think the second piece is on the manufacturing side, right? If you think about solar being a great example, you know, those who've been paying close attention to SpaceX's job boards have seen some very interesting roles pop up on their job boards for, you know, things going all the way down into solar cell chemistry, right? And so when you think about the supply chain for solar, it's been really interesting because space has always been like, what can I like, you know, beg, borrow and steal from the terrestrial solar industry, right? Because the terrestrial solar industry is the big market, right? That's where all the volumes. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of volume being produced there. But I think if you do the math with SpaceX,

you start to understand why that may no longer be the case, right, right? Why orbital data centers may drive a higher total output in terms of gigawatts per year of demanded solar for space rated solar cells. than terrestrial. And a really interesting thing happens, you know, when that happens, right? It's like you're no longer taking terrestrial technology and trying to figure out a way to use it for space. But if you know you have a gigawatt of volume demand, you can actually make something that is space optimized, knowing that you have the volume to justify doing that, right? Whereas before, it was always like, hey, I'm never going to have volume in space to justify doing something different than terrestrial. So let me just reuse terrestrial. So I think you're going to see a lot of really interesting things happen in terms of technology decisions that people make. And, you the direction that solar sells as a technology take, right? Because that shift in volume, which is actually the bigger market between space and terrestrial. You may see the same thing happen on the chip side, right? I think it's kind of hard to believe that the space chip market could outpace the terrestrial chip market. We've always been in this weird game where like the whole reason why Radhardened space-grade chips are so expensive

is because the volume is so low relative to say like what TSMC or Nvidia or others are shipping out for terrestrial users. I think that could change. And when that changes, again, the technology tradeoffs and what type of process technology you use look very different. So I think there's some really valid arguments around, like, people underappreciating that manufacturing scale. And then what that scale then drives in terms of the technology decisions of satellite designers like myself or orbital data center designers or people who are designing chips

and solar cells. So I'm pretty excited to see that transformation. And we're definitely anticipating it. We're setting our own kind of tech roadmap to a long. with what I anticipate is going to be the new reality in terms of what technology is optimal. That's really, yeah, an intriguing kind of flip of things that are, where the driver is, is totally inversing and probably breaks people's mental models for a lot of what's happening. All right, so the typical bugaboo is of like the thermal environment and the, you know, all that

stuff, you kind of go, we'll work through that as implementation details, which is, I'm getting head nodding, which is good. Yeah. Yeah, it's all solvable, right? I think it's challenging. And I won't deny, like I just told you earlier, like thermal is a very hard challenge and you need to go learn those lessons and scale up. But for people like us that have been doing that, right, the gap that we see between kind of what we're doing at the 20 kilowatt scale already today in orbit and what we need

to do for the 100 kilowatt scale, it's not small, but it's also not insurmountable, right? The same technology can be used. It's all about making engineering tradeoffs, right? And I think going back to what you were saying earlier, it's like, I think anybody claiming that it's impossible because of physics is wrong, right? I think it's just a hard engineering problem. And that's exactly where we like to operate. And to your point, a second ago, a hard problem that hasn't had a motivating reason for us to push through it.

You know, I think that's also lost on people a lot of times that there's a lot of problems in the world that we haven't solved yet because there isn't the other end pushing us to do that. And we are unfortunately humans. And I think, like, you could apply this to really, you know, huge areas like climate change. Like, humans respond really well to stimulus. And we ignore the things that aren't a really present stimulus to us right in front of us, you know. And then, but when it gets there, it's like, we're really good at rising the challenge and engineering our way through things. That's literally what humans have done forever.

Like, at one time, we didn't have the wheel and boats. And then we were like, it'll be cool if we went into this ocean. Let's make boats. That's just how we work. And that's probably our greatest weakness and our greatest strength. all in one. But that's also why it's fun to be in space industry doing things that are on that edge, you know. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting too just because, you know, I found that the SpaceX existence proof should be pretty powerful by now, right? I feel like there's a lot of things that

we're saying today. You know, if you think about the LinkedIn posts and sort of the blog posts that people are writing, that people would have written the exact same things, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And so those of us that have seen. Yeah, exactly. Right. And what's really cool is like, I think there's a small community of people who lived through the sort of breaking down what is possible and rising to that challenge, as you said. And all of us now are like, well, okay, we did that, right? So, like, you know, anything is possible from here. And I think that, like, more and more people are starting to realize that, you know, so long as the physics shakes out. And I think Elon has many things, but he understands, like, physics very, very deeply, right? And he's not one to put something

out there that, you know, breaks the laws of physics, right? He would be the first to say that you shouldn't do that. And so once physics holds, then it's just engineering. He's so good at physics that there's some of us that thinks that that's probably what he should spend his time on and not the human side of everything else. But that's another conversation. All right, I want to hear about the roadmap ahead, but let me throw one more weirdo thing at you real quick, guys. I had on Off Nominal last week, and he's been on the show before, I had Andrew Rush talking about star catcher. And if K2 came up in the conversation, because we were talking about how power multiplies. I'm curious if you've dug into the star catcher concepts, what you make of it from

somebody who might have other solar power land on their solar arrays in the future. Like, how does this change? Does it impact what you're planning in the roadmap? Do you think this is a legitimate thing that you're going to take advantage of? What's your state of play there? I've been saying this actually to everybody that's been asking me about like solar cells and alternate power sources, like the way that K2 sees ourselves, right? We will buy power from anybody. When it comes to power and energy, I don't really care what the medium is. I care about the cost and does it get me a significant advantage in the orbit that I'm in? And so in that sense, all power sources are equal.

Now, some are obviously a little bit closer on the tech horizon than others, right? But I think with that in mind, if they deliver a solution that gets me a lower, effective dollar per watt, I would absolutely buy the service, right? And I would do that for anyone developing alternate sources of power for spacecraft because, you know, we are the ones that sort of sit at that intersection of power generation and power usage. And that means that like in order to be the best at that, I don't necessarily want to lock myself into one technology. I want to be focusing on the metric that actually matters, which is the dollar per watt or the watt per kilogram.

Right. And I think that, you know, if you look at it from a dollar per watt or watt per kilogram perspective, you can make an argument that their technology is actually quite interesting. Now, I'm excited to see them kind of develop and continue to show those sort of proof points and milestones. But I'm hopeful that, you know, we will be a customer of theirs down the road and will be a customer of anybody else developing, you know, interesting power energy solutions. Because, you know, we're named after a Karashev type 2 civilization K2. That means that, like, we need a lot of energy and a lot of power to get there, right? So if we're limiting ourselves to one energy source or one medium, we're going to be failing pretty quickly.

I find the way that he's talking about it really interesting because the multiples also land exactly in your region where he's saying what they're planning right now can basically 5x the intake of certain solar rays so that takes your mega and puts it up into the giga class in terms of generation but how does that actually trickle down given what you said earlier about you know what happens when you get up to those power generation like would you basically have to have mega running the subsystems of the giga to actually make use of that and because that doesn't immediately make it backwards compatible then.

There is some, at your scale, certainly some things that you might need to change. At the end of the day, you're still going to be thermally choked, right? So it's like you have to have a solution for how to get that power and that heat out of the satellite. But, you know, that's something where if I knew there were sort of technologies in the horizon, I might oversize my thermal systems a little bit. I might have some certain peak capability that I could offer that maybe otherwise. I couldn't balance kind of that thermal and power demand. But you're right.

But using, you know, effectively trying to 10x your satellite without changing anything in the design is a pretty challenging thing to do just given the thermal bottleneck that almost always pops up on every high power satellite. So in that ballpark, if this was part of your, I'm not forcing you to sign an agreement with Andrew Rush today, though I find you both very intriguing individuals in space. But if that was, if you were taking this approach and you knew that you could land more solar power on your arrays, I guess what I'm getting at is like, is that the hard? part? Is the solar rays the hard part? Because the rest of it sounds really hard to me. And if you're solving the rest of the hard problems, then is it actually compelling to get more power in a smaller form factor on the arrays, given what work went in elsewhere to make that even useful to you? Yeah. So, I mean, if you're if you're kind of eluding at like, would you just build a 10 kilowatt satellite and then trust a 10x power factor to get you to 100 kilowatts down the road?

I think that just goes back to what we're talking about earlier, which is more power always more better, right? If I have 100 kilowatt satellite, I can become, you know, but I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying like the solar collector seems to be the easy component that you're talking about. So like, why is it worth it to make the easy part easier if the hard part got a lot harder? Like it almost, it is way more power, but if you can't do it, do anything with it

without doing the hard parts, then why not to throw some bigger solar rays on there because you already have a giant radiator? I can't figure this out because I'm just a guy who podcasts. I think there is a dynamic there, but ultimately I think, you know, people have to be solving all the technical problems, right? So, you know, while we may focus on really advanced thermal solutions, right,

and say like solar arrays and conventional solar cells are good enough for us for now, there may come a time where we actually want, you know, that excess power. But I agree, you can't just solve one problem. That's why satellite design is so interesting is because no one can claim that, like, one technology makes or breaks their entire, you know, sort of, you know, unit economics or business approach. like a satellite is a fully integrated system. You have to build every part of the tech stack for the satellite to be co-optimized,

right? Which is why I'm like, it's interesting seeing people start to like really lean into the vertical integration now when they didn't start out that way. And I'm like, man, you missed a lot of really interesting optimization opportunities if you didn't start out saying that you were going to build a lot of these things yourself because they all need to be optimized together. You can't just solve one. I guess it does kind of, you know, seeing the rest of the market develop,

might let you tack differently in terms of what you want to pull in-house or what you want to focus on in-house. Like, you know, maybe the solar cells that SpaceX is hiring for, you know, those are going to be very expensive throughout the gate, not even available if they're not going to sell them to the market. And maybe that's not something that you guys reach for. But instead, you know, you have to solve thermal problems. So you can reach for a star catcher to get you, you know, the solar rays you already have, get those over the edge while we go work on the other part. So, you know, it is a, I don't know, insanely complex web of requirements. It's a very interesting time to be the CTO of a space company, right? You have a lot of tools in your toolbox and a lot of really interesting decisions to make.

But I still go back to the same sort of core principle, which is if there's something that is the bottleneck for your system, right? And it's like the core piece. You have to own it yourself. You can't rely on somebody else to solve that problem for you. And we've applied that principle from the very beginning, which is why, you know, for us, that scaling challenge of like being able to build bigger, we're able to do that now because we made those investments from the very beginning. All right, let's talk about what is coming up. You've got some hardware up in space.

You have a lot coming up on the roadmap. Can you hit the highlights for things we should be watching, fun customers, things you can talk about? I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff you can't. Yeah, this is where the conversation gets harder going back to my brother and I's philosophy of putting our heads down and not talking too much about what we do. But I'll start with gravitas, maybe because that's still doing some really exciting stuff in space. So we're going to be making some announcements, I would say, some pretty interesting world records that we've achieved with Gravitas. I'll leave it at that.

But it continues to do some pretty fantastic demonstrations. And at this point, it has been a phenomenally successful mission, all the payloads that we carried have been activated or now generating data. A lot of people don't know this, but Gravitas is actually hosting a lot of space weather sensors as well. So not only are we servicing a lot of great commercial and national security customers, but we're generating useful science data on this first mission, which I think, I think, you know, if you recall, you know, for my brother and I, is a huge, huge, important aspect of why we built K2. So super exciting. We'll be sharing more on the gravitas front in the coming weeks.

As we look ahead, we have a couple launches next year. We've kind of graduated from being, I'd say, a ride share customer to now buying full launches that we can fully manifest with our satellites because of the demand and volume that we have. And so we have two launches next year. One we've announced as the Trinity launch. So Trinity is going to be carrying multiple satellites to multiple orbits. for multiple customers. And so what you can imagine is there are customers that maybe bought a portion of our 20 kilowattatt satellite on Gravitas, dedicated to payload. A lot of those customers now

are graduating to owning full satellites. And then those customers are also graduating to buying full constellations from us. So there is that progression that we're following across all of our different contracts and business threads. And Trinity is kind of a really important next step in that regard. It's also really important because if you're going to be doing a sort of multi-satellite launch inside of a launch vehicle. There's a lot of core technology you have to build when it comes to the dispensing system and how you stack those satellites and doing it at this scale of satellites very, very challenging, right? I can think of one company who has ever done that before, and we're going to be the next one. So Trinity is super important for us. It also is really important

for our software and operations teams because you go from a mindset where you're operating one satellite to operating multiple for multiple customers. And so a lot of really important investments are being made on our tech stack on the ground side. And then the second launch later that year is actually probably can't go into too many details on the customers. It's a mix of national security and commercial customers. What I will say is, you know, we announced recently the partnership with Anderil on the Golden Dome front producing, you know, the host space vehicle for those missions. And that is a really exciting area of growth for us as well. We've always said that, you know, we talk about power a lot, right? But the actual ability to host really,

really high payload mass at low cost is directly relevant for the bottom line for a lot of mission areas, right? Golden Dome being one of them. And so the launches that are coming up after in late 27 and 28 are kind of furthering a lot of our national security programs and commercial programs as well as we build towards the commercial constellation that we announced in that partnership with SES on Miosphere where we're kind of building the satellite buses for them along with a few other systems and helping them scale that Mio constellation. So a lot of lot of these missions that we're doing now are sort of the stepwise iteration to be able to deploy that full constellation beginning in 2028. For someone that doesn't like to talk about what they're

working on, you're working on a lot. Yeah, it's good to return back to the sort of, I would say, like what is our near term plan, right? Like orbital data centers, and I think that the North Star is very, very clear for the industry. But I've always said you need to have a business that makes sense today, right? You can't be waiting and hoping on a market to emerge. And my brother and I, I've definitely run K2 that way where all of our near-term demand, right? When we think about in the rest of the 2020s is built off of, you know, kind of the bread and butter when it comes to existing markets in space and using Falcon 9 really not dependent on kind of some of the really exciting things

that could happen on the orbital data center front. And we have to execute on that really well, right? I kind of said we're a company that, you know, promises our customers that we can actually do what we say we can do. And then we have to go prove it, right? With Gravitas, we started proving that. with our upcoming missions, we're going to continue to prove that. Yeah, you guys have that thing that I like where you have a good vision on where you want the company to head,

where you think the industry's going, a good beat on that, but you're also kind of gritty enough to find your way there through the industry that you're dealing with at the moment. And those are the companies I like to bring on the show. Those are the people that I find working through problems in interesting ways. And honestly, looking back, they're really the only ones that tend to make it. There's a lot of companies that have big talk and have grand plans, but can't figure out that near term of where they're going to walk first. And that is definitely one of the defining things. I've been doing, you know, I have a robotic podcast producer, which meant I have to put a lot of my internal Anthony brain thoughts on the industry down into written guidelines for what to surface my way. And I've spent a lot of time thinking of like, what is actually my rubric?

And that's one of the core pieces is this mix of vision with some real. that gets you through the industry. That's the stuff that I like about what you guys are working on. I think, you know, like I mentioned, Starcatcher kind of has that similar vibe. And even throwing way back, there's guests like nanorax that kind of had that in the early days where they're, you look at them. You're like, they're working on all these weird little disparate things. But when you roll out to an overall vision of where are they heading, you see the full picture. And that's what I like.

I love hearing how you talk about this stuff. Always awesome to have you on. So thanks for hanging out with me for so long. Appreciate it. Yeah. always happy to jump back on and yeah exciting to share a little bit of what we've been working on and expect more to come very soon. Do you want to plug anything, hiring, roles, anything like that? Yeah, so I mean, we're massively scaling.

I think when it comes to the engineers that we're hiring, we're hiring across every single domain expertise. I think I may have mentioned this either on your podcast or another. Satellite bus is actually one of, call it four products that we're working on at K2. It's the only one we've talked about publicly, but we're scaling across all. of the other products as well and some of the roles that you'll see on our on our job board are definitely pretty exciting new developments for K2 that I encourage people to go check out and and yeah, apply if you think you want to join on the journey. Oh, a little scavenger hunt for everybody on the way on.

All right. Thanks so much, Neil. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks. Thanks again, Neil for coming on the show for the K2 space crew for setting this up. Always awesome to work with. Always awesome to talk with.

Find their work very interesting. One of my favorites to have on the shows, honestly, because they are, you know, know me. I like guys that come on that like to talk, actually get into real conversations rather than just PR statements. It's good to actually talk about industry things with industry people. So always appreciative when people are game to come on and participate like that. So thanks again, Neil. And thanks to all of you for supporting the show. This is a 100% listener-supported show, including the executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Lee, Steve, Josh from Impulse, Chris, David, Miles O'Brien, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Jan, Donald, Frank, Better Everyday

Studios, Stealth, Julian, the Asherst, at SCE, Ryan, Matt, Warren, Will and Large from Agile, Pat, Fred, Eunice, Theo and Violet, Russell, Joel, Natasha Saccoz, Joe Kim, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for supporting, for continuing to support every single month, for making this show what it is. I could not do it without you. I am so appreciative. And if you want to join the crew, Maintingacutoff.com slash support, join up there. You get access to Miko Headlines and all of the sort of the back catalog of the subscriber-only stuff that I do as part of MECO. So, Check that out. Support the show. Get more of me in your podcast feed. It's a win-win for all of us, I promise. And yeah, for now, thank you all so much for listening. And I hope you enjoy this show. I'll talk to you soon.