Main Engine Cut Off - T+337: Inversion Space (with Justin Fiaschetti, Co-Founder and CEO)

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Justin Fiaschetti, Co-Founder and CEO of Inversion Space, joins me to talk about the company’s plan to store maneuverable reentry vehicles in orbit for rapid cargo delivery, the design and architecture decisions driving Arc including cross-range requirements and payload accomodations, and how they see the market for these services. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Russell, Fred, Natasha Tsakos, Matt, Joonas, Matt from Built, Josh from Impulse, Pat, Steve, David, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Joel, Stealth Julian, Ryan, Theo and Violet, Kris, The Astrogators at SEE, Miles O’Brien, Jan, Donald, Joakim, Frank, Will and Lars from Agile, Warren, Lee, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics Inversion Arc - Inversion Anduril, Team of Partners to Work on Space Force’s Space-Based Interceptors for Golden Dome for America | Anduril Arc Orbital Supply Capsule Aims To Put Military Supplies Anywhere On Earth Within An Hour 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 Zhou Quan Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. And today we've got Justin Fieschetti, the co-founder and CEO of Inversion Space with us to talk about what they're working on over there. They're working on advanced reentry vehicles, talking about deployment from space. It's a very interesting conversation. It's been a hot topic in the industry lately with a lot of companies making a lot of noise about re-entry either from space stations or from orbital manufacturing. In this case, it's about delivery through space, launching something, putting it into space, deploying it where you need it, when you need it. A really interesting conversation about not only their technical solutions to that, the way they're thinking about the market, the way this interacts in the business environment. Generally, some of the considerations they make when they're in the process of building, designing, and deploying these vehicles. Really great conversation with Justin. I think you'll enjoy it.

So without further ado, let's give Justin a call. All right, Justin, thank you so much for joining me on the show here. You've got an awesome factory background behind you. This is a great backdrop. great setting for the show, so thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Calling in from our LA manufacturing floor and long-time listener, first-time caller,

so excited to talk to you about everything. Yeah, I'm pumped. We were talking to before we got rolling, that reentry has been a topic of late on the shows that I do, and you guys reached out at the right time to capitalize on our interest in it. So I'm really interested to hear the origin story

of inversion, where it came from, what you saw as the direction when you were starting out, maybe that's drifted over the years and as you've found your way. But what was that kind of first starting storyline for you? Yeah, well, maybe a bit for people who don't know inversion, right? So we build maneuverable reentry vehicles that are able to be stored on orbit and then called down to anywhere on Earth in less than an hour.

We use that for a lot of different applications, especially around delivery of cargo. And that's kind of where myself and my co-founder kind of first had the idea. We were living together at the time after having worked at SpaceX and Relativity Space and AVL space systems and designed a few rocket engines. And what we noticed was that space has this inherent attribute of being really great at accessing the entire globe. If you look at the history of kind of the space industry, maybe up until these like AI data centers, the like main. value of space has really been derived from that global access. You know, you can go all the way back to, you know, the 60s when the Corona program started to replace surveillance aircraft, right?

Even the best surveillance aircraft with satellites. And it was really because they just offered such an advantage on global coverage and persistent coverage, et cetera. And then we were starting to see that in 2020 with Starlink coming online and Amazon Kuiper being announced. And really there was this recognition that with launch cost dropping, accessing the globe could be done for more than just imaging, right, than it was internet. And what we asked ourselves was, okay, well, how else could you use this global access? What else could it be useful for? And immediately our minds went to, you know, getting physical cargo back, getting physical items to remote locations extremely quickly. And, you know, this was a classic founding story, I suppose.

We started talking about it, Austin and I at the, you know, while we were cleaning up the dishes at dinner. And then next thing you know, it's 3 a.m. And we're like, we got to do this. We got to go for this. So we, you know, then spent the next few weeks really pressure testing the idea, trying to find something wrong with. it honestly, right? Like, somebody's got to be doing this. There's got to be some fundamental challenge that we're not seeing, and we couldn't find any. We kept seeing, like, positive signs that this could be extremely valuable to be able to open up a new transportation mode for humanity,

just as the aircraft did with the sky. So then we, you know, a few months later, founded inversion, we went through and got accepted to Y Combinator, a leading business accelerator, and did that over the summer of 2021, we're able to raise our seed round, and then that kind of kicked off the journey of inversion. So what were the things, you know, as you worked through those early days and then the early days of the company,

what were the things that you found were the biggest issue to solve to unlock the opportunity? Like, no one else was doing it, was that they hadn't found the buyer, or there's something about reentry and guidance that was really sticky. What were the things that you were most worried about going in?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest challenge around deployment from space, which is kind of what this category is being called, is how do you have a single vehicle on orbit, access a large swath of area on the ground? And then how do you have it land precisely? Those two problems kind of lead down what product direction needs to happen for deployment from space to become a reality. On the first one, having a large coverage area. That's important so that you don't need thousands and thousands and thousands of vehicles up on orbit just to have like the single layer of coverage of the globe. You know, you look at Starlink and it has thousands and thousands. That doesn't super work for deployment from space. You want to bring the cost down of the whole network because each individual delivery system is some amount of value once it is used. And so how do you increase rates? range. Well, what we did is we went back to the 60s when they were looking at this exact problem for the Corona program. So the Corona program, if people aren't familiar, was where the U.S.

government was using film cameras in orbit to be able to image around the globe. And they would drop these reentry capsules, just a sphere cone capsule that's a ballistic reentry vehicle, back into the atmosphere and they would get caught by an aircraft while they're under parachute. But one of the challenges that the government was having was that they would have to wait to return that film until the orbit of that imaging satellite processed until it was over their designated landing location, which meant it was very difficult for them to get real-time images or as real-time as they could have, because of these ballistic capsules. They would just fall back to wherever they were,

so you have to wait until you have the perfect alignment. And so that kicked off a development campaign to build maneuverable reentry vehicles, specifically lifting body reentry vehicles. It started with a program called Asset. That allowed them, that kind of demonstrated this idea of maneuverable reentry, allowing for large cross-range.

That then progressed to, a program that goes by a number of different names. It goes by the name of Prime. It goes by the name of X23A. It goes by the name of SV5D. But it's basically the genesis of the kind of like more mature version of a lifting body reentry vehicle. And the explicit reason for moving towards lifting bodies was that once they enter the atmosphere, they can bank and have a lot of cross range so they could get back to their landing site in a

timely manner without having to let the orbits process. And we saw that and we were like, okay, that is the same color of problem that we're trying to solve, which is store on orbit, access the globe rapidly. And that led us down this path of lifting body reentry vehicles, but taking the last 60 or 70 years of technical advantages, you know, probably have like a million times the processing power as what those systems had, right? And so, You know, if you think back then, they were not even able to fly unstable aircraft because the control systems were not good enough, right? And so we have a really funny sentence that they can't fly unstable aircraft. It's like, yeah, no shit, dude. Right, right, totally. And amazing part is now we can. Yeah. And now we can. And we've been able to for a long time, that has yet to be applied to reentry. If you look at every reentry vehicle, they are passively stable. That is like a great conservative way to go.

That works well for a limited amount of processing power. It works well when you need a kind of simple system, especially with human spaceflight. But there are a lot of advantages we now have with faster processors, better control systems, better GNC loops, better actuators, better materials that really turn what they started into the 60s into a totally different technical problem. Cross range is a really interesting driver of mission architecture.

Famously, the shuttle's cross range was determined by how much they needed to be able to launch out of Vandenberg into polar orbit and do a once-around return to Vandenberg. So the cross-range was aligned with this mission that never flew, which did sufficiently freak out the Soviets that we might launch and capture a Soyuz or a spy satellite and bring it back down. It was like some crazy James Bond-esque storylines that drove the cross-range constraints there. In your world, I'm curious the tradeoffs that you make for cross range, because the more cross-range you have, the fewer orbital planes you need to be able to hit those metrics that you're talking about of returning within an hour. But are there other constraints and trades that you're making

in terms of payload size or spacecraft capability? What are you losing as you increase cross-range, or are those independent metrics that you're designing with? Yeah. Cross range is a really difficult thing to achieve. Or I guess you can get a little bit of cross range quite easily. But when you want to start pushing it towards the limits where it makes a major difference in the number of orbital planes you need, it starts to become a pretty complicated technical challenge.

It's quite interconnected. Maybe stepping from like the least amount of cross range vehicle architecture you could have up to the most or close to the most. The least amount is just a ballistic reentry vehicle. A sphere cone, it just falls down and it goes to where it goes. Slightly more cross-range would be like a traditional capsule with an off-centered center of gravity. So you're generating a little bit of lift. It's not just purely drag.

And you can kind of steer by rolling the spacecraft. And that's Apollo, that's Orion, the ones that you're thinking of when he says that. Absolutely. And they use that to great effect to make sure they can skip off the atmosphere for lunar return, so that they're not plummeting right down in. Then you can start to have a category of winged aircraft or winged spacecraft. This is like the space shuttle. This is like X37B, the Space Force's spaceplane. and those are using the lift of wings in a lot of ways to have their cross range. But they come with a number of tradeoffs specifically. One is that wings are extremely large and they are very difficult to fit into a faring of the traditional commercial rockets that we have today.

And that's solved a lot of times by having actuarable wings, which becomes very heavy, very complex, etc. A lot of the reason that you'll see these space planes designed as space planes is because they need to run land horizontally on a runway. And that is, you know, the space shuttle did that. X-37B does that. Dream Chaser is supposed to do that. But what you're getting is you're trading off hypersonic lift for subsonic lift. Because you have to have these wings that are capable of generating enough lift when you're landing for you to softly land.

but that's not optimal for hypersonic cross range. So the approach we've taken is taking the lifting body, removing the need for subsonic maneuverability or lift, by using a guided parachute system, just like you would have on like a skydiver would have, that they can go and land accurately and land softly. And at the scale of our vehicles, that's a far better trade-off for us

than having these large wings that we have to fold in and fold out, and then the material problem becomes super complicated. So then when you start looking at, okay, how do you maximize your cross range for a lifting body? There's a few different ways. One is you need the vehicle to be as sharp as possible. That leads to some really challenging thermal problems. That leads to some very challenging controls problems, especially if you're using ablative materials. But it also leads to that sweet golden dome contract, the sharper you get, you know what I'm saying?

And the key thing on lifting bodies, right, is the shape of the frontal area of the vehicle needs to be reduced as much as possible to limit drag while maximizing lift. And so that kind of leads you to this more sleek shape, this sharper shape that changes the, geometry of the payload bay that you could have. And so what are the tradeoffs? There are a few different tradeoffs. One is you generally have to have far better aerodynamics. They're not as simple. They're much more complicated, much more, you need much more high fidelity analysis. You might even need some really detailed wind tunnel testing. You need better materials to allow for those sharper noses. And you need a much, much better control system, GNC algorithm, and a flight computer to enable all of that. And so kind of all of that leads to this like new category of

advanced reentry, right? It's not just, you know, falling back down. It's like, how do you actually exploit your velocity of orbit during reentry for a productive gain? And so that's kind of where a lot of inversions focuses is on those key technology areas of materials, aerodynamics, and autonomy. And you mentioned Golden Dome. That's kind of, you know, we are very focused on those categories, which put us in a good technical seat. Yeah, that's, I'm curious if you feel like the, I don't even know if there's increased interest in this area in the industry, as much as there's increased talk about it in the industry right now, where we've got inversion, we've got outposts, We've got a lot that are looking at it in ways, and I think pleasantly surprising all of us out here,

not immediately converging on the same, you know, every launch vehicle looks like a Falcon 9. It's got nine engines and one on the upper stage. Like, it's not, those converged so quickly, whereas I think this market is divergent. And there are similarities, right? You've got guided parachutes, the same way that Outpost is thinking about it. But they're thinking about cargo containers and you're thinking about lifting bodies. So it's fun to see what's going on here. But I'm curious how much, you know,

what do you think the factors are that are causing there to be an increased presence in the industry? I'll put it that way. Is it the fact that there's, it's an access to space cost conversation and now we can do this kind of thing? Is it that there's also this overlapping interest in hypersonics research and Golden Dome? And there's a national security side that is a nice ride along. Is it just the blend of all of that that makes it more interesting for you? Yeah, I think it is the blend. I think it is that there is a kind of a big wave of demand from the government across various different applications, whether it be defense or space exploration or just general national security efforts. I think it's super interesting. You bring up the form factor of these vehicles. And, you know, I was in the launch industry. You look at launch and you're right. It's all converged. And there's good reason for. that, right? It is, you know, Falconi is quite an efficient way to get stuff to orbit.

And if you look at launch vehicles, kind of the only thing that matters is dollar per kilogram to orbit. Yes, there are some nuances of like smaller launch vehicles let you get to specific orbits, but I think we've seen that play out that that's not that big of a demand driver for customers for launch or for satellites. And so the natural progression of any launch company would be, okay, what is the way to get my dollar per kilogram as low as possible, right? We're seeing that with Starship. We're seeing that with Taryn R. We're seeing that with Stoke. I think it's a great, a great analogy for this is ocean free. And for shipping, shipping containers across the globe. What do you care about with those vehicles? What do you care about with those boats?

You only care about dollar per kilogram to get across the ocean. And so they naturally progress to a common form factor. And obviously there are some other constraints, right? Just, you know, the size of the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal. And that's similar to launch, right? There's certain constraints on material properties and stuff like that. But all you care about is dollar per kilogram. So you're optimizing that. If you look at reentry vehicles, I think a better analogy is the aircraft market, where the shape and the size and the form factor dictate the applications it can address. A passenger aircraft looks totally different than a fighter jet, which looks totally different than a bomber, which looks totally different than a crop duster. And I think we're seeing a similar thing

in the reentry market, which is the specific form factor allows for different applications or optimizes for different things. Our maneuverable reentry vehicles are extremely great at covering a large swath of area by being stored in orbit and precision landing. But if let's say you don't care about the precision of your payloads, you would probably trend towards a more blunt body reentry vehicle. Now, our view is that the actual cost trend towards the cost per unit, the actual vehicle generally actually trend towards close to the similar number of a actively controlled maneuverable reentry vehicle versus a passive reentry vehicle. There's a lot more R&D expense to start and the kind of stand up of the manufacturing system is a lot higher. But the terminal cost is

actually not all that great. And so you can use maneuverable reentry vehicles for the same missions at a relatively cost competitive as non-maneuverable reentry vehicles, but it's impossible to go the other direction. You cannot take a non-maneuverable reentry vehicle and use it for the specific missions of a actively controlled lifting body system. So that's kind of why our technical bet, why our company has been oriented around, admittedly, a much, much more challenging technical problem of building our ARC vehicle, our lifting body reentry vehicle. I'll put in the show notes a link to the interview I did Jason Dunn at Outpost,

because if people are listening to this, they should go listen to that too, because I think understanding the full market is interesting. Because there's also missions, though, where the Outpost model, I think, is fit better for, dropping something into a contested environment or an area where, like, I'm mostly asking, your thing looks pretty, pretty awesome. Like, I assume there's some stuff in there that we don't want other people getting their hands on.

So we probably wouldn't be as comfortable dropping one of these into a contested area where we might not have full security of the vehicle. Is that fair to say, or is there something I'm missing? I would use the analogy that we also don't want our adversaries to get their hands on our aircraft or our helicopters, but yet we don't fly hot air balloons into contested environments. So I don't know why that is a concern for this specific topic, personally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I kind of understand the basis of the argument, but I think that it is a,

as we see this market progress, you know, hot air balloons are easy to defend against. You know, you can't get them into contested areas. I can get an airplane in. I think maneuverability is going to kind of rain on that. Yeah, yeah. All right. So when we look at ARC itself, talk about the payload accommodations that you've got on there in terms of sizing, what can we fit?

What kind of things should we think about inside one of these vehicles when it's coming down? Yeah. So, you know, when we look at the kind of cross-section of the market for when we're looking at cargo delivery, there is, you know, in our view, there's risks of being too small, right? If you can just carry like a sandwich, it's not useful for the cost. Yeah, but I bet you miss some sandwiches from Jersey out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, getting a sub would be great in a remote location.

Get a pork or leg and cheese whenever I can't. There's not in L.A. Drop that out in L.A. I know. It's crazy, man. So there's the risk of being too small. But we also see that in the current, with current launch pricing and even launch pricing for like, you know, until there's a competitor with Starship. not starship being online, but until there's something to actually drive pricing down, being too large also has a little bit of a risk, right? Where you, the frequency of which you will use that much mass is actually too, is too infrequent.

And so we're aiming for this sweet spot, which we call like mission enabling cargo, right, where we can support the actual more regular missions that happen, whether that be, deploying medical supplies to a wounded soldier or a downed airman, whether that be deploying communications equipment, whether that be deploying specific cargo that a team needs in a remote location, that lets them go complete their mission. So then when you're looking at the value proposition, it's not how much does it cost me to get this piece of cargo, but rather, how valuable is the mission that this cargo lets me go and do? And that's... how we kind of see where the market today is with pricing and with costs and with willingness

to pay. Versus when you go too small, it's like just that you can't enable a mission that is, you know, worth enough for that small piece of cargo. When you go to large, there aren't many of those kind of like immediate missions that you need remote access very quickly that need that much payload from what we've seen. Eventually, I think that will be the case as these launch vehicles come online, but we personally are not betting on Starship pricing in the tens of dollars of kilograms today. And so that's kind of how our payload is built around it. You know, we also are able to use that same payload for hypersonic testing.

We mentioned that a bit earlier. And that is very, you know, the U.S. kind of let our foot off the gas 20 years ago on hypersonics. It's kind of been that's coming in waves, the interest. The last five years, chips are all in. There's massive amounts of funding. We're really trying to develop the next gen as a country, the next gen of hypersonics. That includes materials. That includes components.

That includes software. And so having a platform that can be used for that, not just for materials testing on the outside, but also recoverable under our guided parachute, and get your payloads back. we've seen a lot of demand for. So in those use cases, is your vehicle, does it need to come back in from orbit? Or can one of these sit on top of a rocket lab haste, for instance? Yeah, we've designed ARC to be launched vehicle agnostic.

So it's very much up to the customer on the specific mission profile. There are benefits to either direction on how you would, like whether you would go with a suborbital or an orbital, type of mission. And just different customers have different needs depending on what they're trying to test. Can you talk to me about some of the heat shield aspects here? Because there's been some online discourse

around the Starship Heat Shield in the last couple of days. Shout out for my upcoming episode Off Nominal that are recorded the other day that will be interesting with the slew of people that have been saying this is a dead-end technology that Starship is working on. we need to invent some new heat shield materials. We need to reinvest in this market.

How are you approaching the heat shield question for ARC? Yeah, I have been also seeing all of that on Twitter. And it's super interesting, right? Like you look at the first Starship flight and like half of the tiles fell off and they burned apart and everything. I think it's super interesting their assembly process, right? It's a mechanical attachment with like basically this like crunch foam that acts as the joint filler. I remember seeing it on the Mr. Beast video that he did where he put a tile in. That sentence will make no sense to people 20 years ago or 20 years from now.

I'm the first in my bloodline to say that sentence. And so it's super cool, right? And it makes total sense why you would go down that path for Starship, where it's meant to be exceptionally reusable. Like, you know, Elon wants it to turn around in whatever, his hours or what have you. And so you kind of have to go down this refractory radiatively cooled heat shield path. And they have some advantages with it being a mechanical attachment and stainless steel substructure where they're not really limited by their online temperature like you might normally see in a TPS system.

There's less issues with like boiling of that, which causes their pockets, which we saw being an issue in the first Artemis test, and then hence has been fixed with an updated trajectory. For values of fixed, yes. Yes. So I think that's like a very good path for them. I don't know if it is a dead end or not for this, or for Starship.

I would be surprised if SpaceX, went down a path this long that was a dead end. No doubt they have done that and they're really great at changing direction immediately or as soon as they realize that that is a dead end. And I'm sure they are working on new materials. I don't actually know, but I would be surprised if they aren't. We have very different TPS requirements at inversion than what Starship has. First off, our vehicles are dramatically smaller. And that has two effects. One is we don't need as much physical TPS material,

and it doesn't take as long per vehicle to assemble, just naturally by having an actually number, probably two orders of magnitude, less surface area. Not 18,000 tiles. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And one of the things we talked about earlier was cross-range,

and how important that is to customers. And so we've gone down the path of using a belated, materials rather than radiatively cooled materials. They are substantially higher performance, generally. They are generally lighter for that performance. They have good heritage developed by NASA over the last few decades for interplanetary probes, though they're less reusable, right? They actually literally physically change shape as they reenter. And so that causes a bunch of aerodynamic issues. as having a reentry vehicle changing shape they're trying to actively control, we have some good solutions for that.

But it really lets us push the performance of our reentry vehicles and not be heat flux limited or heat load limited in many of our trajectories. So we've kind of really pushed heavily on this ablative material path for our vehicles. And is the idea that the heat shield, itself would then be replaced for the next mission and is separable enough from the rest of the body that you're able to go and reuse the rest of the vehicle and swap out the heat shield, or is this kind of a rebuild the entire time, at least for, you know, you can give me if there's Gen 1 is this, but Gen 2, we're thinking this. That's right. Yeah. We actually don't know if we're

going to go down the path of reusability. Like, there is reason to believe that it could be a net benefit. But there's also reason to believe that we, getting to the volumes that we're seeing in demand is actually a better way to drive costs down than trying to invest in the kind of additional R&D and testing that is neat and, you know, additional mass and margin on the vehicle itself that's needed for reusability. It's still in the traits, to be completely honest, on that. Like we saw Rocket Lab go after a reusability with electron and they're not doing that anymore. I think probably partly because they wanted to test for neutron and neutrons coming online, so it's not worth the... I feel like the helicopter pilots might have quit, but, you know,

so they were like, whoop, we're not doing that ever again. That was, it was terrifying. That was, I don't know, Peter Beck, I think, is a pilot himself. He could, uh... Yeah, I mean, he's not hopping in there. The shareholders will not love that. I'll ask. no Hereback's awesome he's awesome mad respect to him I think yeah

I mean that was more of a statement on electrons future I feel like then the recoverability of it but that comment you make is very interesting

and honestly in the wake of that Starship discourse I've been kind of wondering the same it's like you know SpaceX the only way they're going to get

to the ultimate version of the heat shield for Starship is probably by building and flying a thousand starships and that will be better in the long run than trying to nail it with a heat shield that shall never change after the 13th flight.

That's kind of a ridiculous rubric, if you ask me. And, you know, for what you're laying out there, if you have a number in mind on where costs start to turn in a really good direction and you want to make sure you're building that many, you know, I don't know, we've heard a lot of stories like this. In the early days of New Glenn, people were talking about they're only going to manufacture two, three, or four New Glenn stages and just fly them continually. Also sounds kind of ridiculous. You've got all this tooling, you've got a factory that's able to produce these, you're going to want replacements. That sounds more expensive in the long run than just having a few things to fly. So, yeah, long term, some mix of both is right.

You do need to maintain production. You do need to reuse things where you can and where it makes sense. But yeah, it's, you know, I'm, it's curious to figure out how that roadmap lands for you. Like, how do you see that, that early production era going? When do you make the call of, all right, now we're actually. the payloads or the payload facilities inside of the vehicle or the vehicle itself is getting so complex that I do want to reuse those costs I've already spent. Like, is there a moment that you have in mind of going, oh, that's the right moment to turn that reusability idea and center that on our roadmap? Yeah. There is a great, I think there was like a study, but I know it as an anecdote, which is an art teacher, had her middle school students break into two groups.

and they had a pottery wheel each. And she said, you know, here's a bunch of clay. You both have an hour. Group one, I want you to make the perfect pot. I want you to make the best pot you possibly can. Group two, I want you guys to make as many pots as you can. She goes as fast as you can. She comes back in an hour and you see the two pots.

And the group that was told to make the best pot they can looks quite good, right? It looks pretty good. Clearly, someone's first time making a pot, but they put effort and a lot of time into it. And she moves over to group two, and it is incredible. It is like a master has done it. Because in the course of that hour, they made 100 pots. And they got to learn how the pottery wheel works. And they learned not to spin it too fast and how much pressure to use.

And they ended up actually having a better product by iterating and by getting, learning and testing and moving, then somebody who just said, I'm going to make the best thing ever first. We take that to heart here, where flight and learnings are just so important and iterating. So, you know, the early arcs will be functional, absolutely great products for our customers, but they'll only get better from there. And so at some point, we'll look at this and say, all right, we've kind of hit a knee in the curve where the vehicle isn't changing all that much. We are, you know, in a good spot and we can kind of start building a fleet perhaps. Imagine if Falcon 9 stuck with the initial blocks rather than, you know, going to full thrust,

then block five or whatever the order was. And now you have such a great vehicle. They don't need to, they hit the knee in the curve and they had to go to a step change in technical approach, which was Starship. So when does that happen for us? I don't totally know. I think that we have a lot of really creative ideas on how to continue to improve the product

even after the first few flights that will be really great. So I'm still trying to answer that question myself. Yeah, yeah. Practical. Too reasonable for this show. I want to make sure you don't have a hard out because I noticed I'm going over the calendar slot.

I don't have that many questions left. but one that I do have is the missions that you have in mind, you know, is the payload that comes down on Arc, the payload that was put in at launch, or are there ideas that you have for returning payloads from a space station or a factory in space, getting something from space that's up there right now and bringing it down? Or is this like, I'm coming down with what I launched?

Yeah. For the foreseeable future, it is that payloads are loaded on the ground, launched and then when they land it's the same things that were put inside. We've looked at Space Station Return. We've looked at, you know, Looner Return, we've looked at asteroid mining return, all of which, from a first principal's perspective, should be big eventually, but we just haven't seen those markets mature quick enough for us to want to put our efforts into optimizing our products for those.

Space Station return itself is just like a bear of a problem. Anything that goes close to, you know, a human race station, let alone a, you know, or a $100 billion station, let alone with humans in it, is substantially a high burden of proof on safety. We've looked at manufacturing in space as being able to support that, and we can support that. We are able to, but it's not our focus, right? We don't do any of it. We barely spend time on it. I think that there is a lot of excitement and effort going into it. And if that market breaks, if that market actually materializes, awesome.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of pharma companies, a lot of materials companies that want to put stuff in space and we'll be happy to put them in our payload bay, just as we would be happy to put any other customers. but to date we have not seen enough evidence that that market is near versus a lot of the markets that we are going after and have contracts for and have seen inflect already that we want to put our focus on. And then, you know, I think with the way that you compare that up is what do I need to go to develop to do rendezvous, proximity ops, docking

versus what are the hard parts I've already solved with ARC and, you know, rendezvous and docking's sounds stupid, but it's probably the easier part compared to what you're working on now. So easier to save that for later when we need it versus also putting that on the critical path for, you know, beginning operations. All right. So let's let's end on you kind of sketching. You know, I mentioned some contracts there.

I want to hear what kind of markets you have in mind. What are those contracts you're working on if you're able to talk about it? And one thing I didn't ask up front of sort of painting the picture for what does the operational, you know, arc deployment look like. Orbital planes, locations, altitudes, inclinations, what are we thinking across maybe mapping back to some of those customers that you've either signed or have in mind? Yeah.

So we have kind of like three categories of markets that we've announced. We have delivery, which we've talked a lot about today. We have hypersonic testing. And then we recently announced that we are on the Andrews-Colden dome team for the space-based interceptor program. Really, really exciting and happy to be on a team alongside Impulse Space, K2, Voyager Space, India National Labs. We are by far the smallest team, the smallest company on that sheet.

And it's been great working with everybody there. That's a pretty wild list, man. It's a powerhouse. They put an exceptional team together. As far as the kind of deployments of, of arc, what we can say at the moment is, you know, lower orbit is the best place to be if you want to get back down to the ground. And like the long-term vision is that, like, I think it's like, maybe not even the long term. Like, it is, we have a very clear view to having thousands of these on orbit with various different payloads.

That is like, if you think about Starlink, right, it's like a single service. but we get to, I guess, theoretically benefit as a business from the diversity of demand for the specific payload that's inside of our vehicle. And so, you know, and what we're seeing is that it's an exceptionally elastic market, which is the lower I can make covering the globe, lower costs I can make covering the globe, the more different payloads people have utility to put in there. And we'll see that kind of continue until eventually, you know, we'll hit deep into the commercial market. And so, you know, thousands and thousands of these will be on orbit quite quickly, I think, surprisingly quickly.

If you think about like the scale up of Falcon 9, it took, you know, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever it was. And that's generally how like the infrastructure layer of any market happens, right? It takes so while to build out the railroads, but then the services that are built on top of those railroads actually grow quite quickly. You can think about how fast standard oil grew versus the railroads, as an example. and the infrastructure layer is built, right? And it's scaling itself. I think we will see ourselves vastly outpacing the flight rate of any vehicle, maybe other than Starlink, that has happened before,

just in the next like two or three years. No, that's a statement, man. You just booked yourself a ticket back on the show. One thing I'm interested in is the... some use cases I have in mind, right, of hurricane recovery supplies, that kind of thing, where, you know, a huge storm comes through. You need to re, you know, kind of need to reapply communications to somewhere. You've got to drop some initial supplies to support recovery ops or humanitarian efforts. Some of those kind of use cases are grouped in a certain section of the earth that make it harder to have hourly delivery, where you're going to want, you know, low latitudes have the hurricanes. This is not a high latitude situation. So you need, I guess depending on the cross range,

you could cover that with fewer, I guess, right? If your cross range is able to cover more ground and your ground track is fairly close to the equator, then what does your range actually look like with four, five, or six on orbit at any given time? It's such an interesting problem to try to do that puzzle. All right, if I'm thinking about this use case, and I know that that's this part of Earth, how many do I actually need to cover that?

Is that the way you're pairing markets you have in mind with applications? Yeah. So it's actually the mid-latitudes that are the most challenging to cover. At the equator, right, I'm just going to put an equatorial band. The poles, I'm just going to put a polar orbit. And then as you actually go between them, you start to see a peak of quantity of vehicles needed to cover a specific latitude, right around 45 degrees. It's not exactly, but it's roughly that. Right about New Jersey.

Yeah, exactly. Right there. We're in the dead zone. Yeah. Tough. The approach we're taking is there is a sizable number of applications that global coverage is ideal. And so we're starting there. It's easier to get into a, you know, an SSO.

orbit. It is, there's, there's more demand for that. So you can tune your constellation depending on where you want to be covering the most, right? So for, let's say, hurricane, hurricane assistance, right, you're going to want to be in those lower to mid latitudes. For, but then for example, you might want to have like a cold weather kit in polar, right? You wouldn't have that in equatorial. So there are some things that are like geographically constrained, but there's a ton of things that are just like need or needed basically everywhere. And we don't totally know where they're going to be needed. And so you can't pre-position them or it's too remote to pre-position them or you're not allowed to pre-position them. And it's better to just have it on orbit, right?

Like a lot of the data center discourse in space is like we're not allowed to build data centers on Earth. So we have to find it's like a real estate play. And there is a lot of that similar thing across the globe. When you think about global, where can you put stuff globally, right? There's a lot of sovereignty concerns. There's a lot of like physical remoteness concerns that just physical, that you literally can't put stuff like in the middle of the ocean or in the deep Arctic. And so for a lot of those, like space is just like literally better.

Yeah, it's closer. Literally closer, right? You know, you think about, you know, the most remote islands, you know, there's always a story that people on the space station are the closest humans to them. Yeah. And so, like, we're very focused on, like, that, there's two aspects. There's remote access and there's speed. Speed is always better.

We're always going to be faster to deliver stuff than basically anything else. But there's a large category of things that we're just literally better and cheaper, regardless of speed, just because of the remoteness. So there's kind of these markets have two different intersections. that are, that drive demand, let's say. All right, man. Well, this was awesome. That is the end of my list.

Super fun to talk with you. Anything you want to call out? You want to plug you guys hiring out there? Yep, we're hiring. I think across literally every role. There's construction going on right now behind me. So sorry if there's some noise. We're based in L.A.

We're hiring great people, both touch labor and engineering. and ops. So, um, uh, feel free to apply. Awesome. Well, thank you so much,

Justin. Uh, great conversation. You're an awesome communicator about this stuff. I think it was really interesting to listen to. I hope people enjoy it out there. So thanks again. Thank you for having me on. Thanks again to Justin for coming on the show having such a great conversation.

Always enjoy talking with the people that are, uh, enjoying talking. So I'm sure we'll talk with him again on the show at some point in the future. Uh, but for now I want to say thank you to everyone who supports the main engine cutoff over at Managing Cutoff. slash support. There are 900 and something of you across the places that you're supporting. Some of you on

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