Off-Nominal - 120 - Big Dumb Satellites

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Karan Kunjur, Co-Founder of K2 Space, to talk about what they’re building, and what it means to build for a post-Starship future.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 120 - Big Dumb Satellites (with Karan Kunjur) - YouTubeSpace-based solar power is not a thing – Casey Handmer's blogNew Solar Arrays to Power NASA’s International Space Station Research | NASAGraviticsFollow KaranKaran Kunjur (@KaranKunjur) / XK2 Space | Developing large satellites for a post-Starship futureFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Good morning, Jake. Good morning. How's it good? Morning for you. It's lunchtime here, man. And like I was like mentally preparing myself for the different time slot today. Like all last night and like, you know, like lying awake.

Like got to remember. Got to remember. Like my schedule is different tomorrow. And then I like got up and did my routine and I was like, it's like right away. And I was like rushing all of a sudden. Like I still did not plan for it. So anyway, we're having an off nominal, off nominal today. That's how it goes.

Karan, welcome to the show. You made it. You're in a weird slot. You're in the 9 a.m. hour out on the West Coast. So I don't know how we ended up in this situation, but this was a better situation than delaying talking to you because it's been too long since I've seen you in person. We're just talking about the Space Symposium when we got to hang out.

So it's good to see you again. Good to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. I assume you're doing a dramatic unveil of whatever's through the window behind you at some point. So that'll be good. There's going to another dramatic, just a bunch of equipment and a little trash can. There's a couple of trash cans. I think I see at least two. Yeah. It's good.

It's actually funny. We had our housewarming, and we had our housewarming party, like we had taped out what the satellites look like. And we've removed the tape because the gigaclass satellite, the tape went all the way out to the parking lot behind the building and we had to remove it. So, all right, foreshadowing for the conversation. Put that one in your hard-hitting journalism questions list. Yeah, yeah. Please give me dimensions. Yeah, okay.

Oh, wow. Okay. So I guess drinks, like, I'm really curious to see what everyone went with at morning time. So we'll see. It's lunch. I got a beer. Yeah. Okay.

So a couple weeks ago, when you were gone, Jake, and I did the cycling podcast for a week, our guest, Jonathan Votters, didn't have a drink right on him, but he mentioned that he had breakfast wine. So I was like, I really feel like after that I'd never had an excuse. anymore to not bring a drink to the show. So I feel like I was debating it, but I just grabbed a beer out of the fridge. It's the same one as last week. It's a Trogg's beer.

So it's noon here. It's noon here. And I am. Okay. It's okay for beer. For just to get into our other random things that we enjoy about life that aren't space. I'm going to a newfound glory show tonight, which is going to be great. Do you guys remember Newfound glory?

So that would be fun. So I'm starting real early on this tailgating situation. That's amazing. You get to bring your cane as you go there and hang out with all the other mid to late 30 people. I just said, when I was young, since I'm still as short as I've ever been, it was really annoying because the mosh pit would jump really high. So I'm glad that everyone else's knees have gotten worse quicker than mine have, and I can see you now. I can actually see what they look like. It's great.

Or maybe not. I don't know. We'll see. Oh, that's amazing. Oh, wow. Jake, you brought something spicy. What did you got? What you got?

Yeah. Okay. So I wanted to do a coffee thing today. So I got back from five weeks in Canada and there was, you know, just lots of activity and a fair amount of beer. So I'm just trying to dry out this week and just, you know, to have a good day. So I'm not drinking alcohol today. But I do have some cool coffee I wanted to try.

So this is Mexican coffee. I mean, I don't think it's anything super special. You can get at the grocery store. But, you know, it's from here and it's got a cool bag. But I really wanted to like Mexicanize it. So I brewed it with cocoa powder, cayenne, and cinnamon right in the, in the, you know, in the coffee maker. So now I have this like real, it's real spicy. It's a little, it's a little bit.

So it really hits the back of the throat. So it's really nice way to wake up. Good for your esophagus that has clearly been through some stuff in the last month. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's great.

What do you drink in the morning out there? So, I mean, I'm typically a. coffee guy at 9 a.m. But I brought a breakfast beer. It's actually a pretty interesting beer. So I was at Viassette visiting them like the day after they had their big launch, right? And they actually had at their launch party, they had like a custom beer that they had made. I can't see this. Wow. Is it like mostly functional?

See, that's the problem. I can't really drink it yet. So I'm going to hold off and save this to drink it. When the stuff is functional. Like you might just be able to drink a little bit of it. like maybe half, you could probably, and then just get a couple other beers to help out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we'll see. I was trying to figure out, like, how long could I store this? Like, could I store this until they actually, you know, there's a mission with the K2 bus,

and it still tastes, like, reasonable and not poisoning? I'm not sure. Like, how long can you store beer? Yeah, we'll find out. A lot, but I don't know. I'm drinking. I know what's that long. Yeah, I'm drinking.

One time I was at a grandma's birthday party at a country club, and the only beer that they had was like winter beer from four years previous and it was not good. So if the winter ails Sierra Nevada winter ails any indication, you shouldn't drink a like 2016 in 2020 or whatever it was. I forget what the time lapse was. I would think it was about four years, four seasons though. So yeah, don't do that. Well, we'll find out. I think in like four years. It's good time. I can, which is right. You're not going to get any UV degradation there. Right. So that's nice.

Can you freeze beer? What does that do? I assume that would turn out like soda does, right? Yeah, I don't think it would be good. And it would have to be really cold because the alcohol, right? I don't know. I'll say. Thoughts.

Everyone noodle on that. Science thoughts are on all. Can you freeze beer? For later as a treat, right? All right. Jake. You start us off because I've grilled this gentleman in real life before. Okay, okay, okay.

And I'm curious where you're at on this. Well, I'm just like really excited for this conversation because this is a, your company is a concept that is trying to answer like one of the hugest questions that is just like just weighing me down about everything that's happened with rockets and that we have these really cool like giant rockets that are coming online. and I don't know if anyone's ready for them. Like, what the hell are we going to put in these damn things? Because they're enormous.

Like, you know, we can talk about Starship, but all the other ones, too. New Glan, Vulcan's got a pretty big payload. Like, these are just huge, huge rockets, and we're basically set up to make tiny little satellites or medium-sized satellites for everything we've done so far. And so, you know, I'm trying to figure out how do we fix that? How do we get ahead of that? And so you're trying to do that.

And so that's why I'm just, like, really excited to talk you. But maybe just tell us a little bit about K2 and what you're working on. And what's the, what's the pitch? Yeah, yeah. So I started K2 with my brother, who's an ex-Pasex engineer, about 13 months ago. And really kind of how this all came together was, Neil and I've always talked about starting a space company together. Our, like, love of space started when we were, like, basically kids. I was like 10, he was 5.

We moved into a new house. And one whole wall, one of the bedrooms had, like, the Earthrise. which is like the Earth rising over the moon. And we fought over who would get that, right? And I obviously went out. It's a big brother privileges, which he never lets me forget. But he made up for it by going and working for SpaceX, right? So for us, it's always been in our plan, right?

We wanted to go build a space company. We knew it was like not if it was when. We both had, you know, a pretty interesting time at the beginning of last year where we were like, hey, like, should we look at the space thing? And what we wanted to do is find that really hard problem and find a problem that it felt like nobody was going after. And so we looked at like the spacecraft, you know, the small spacecraft, it felt like generally a solved problem.

There's a lot of different companies going after it. And someone's going to do it right, maybe five or six will do it right. That didn't seem like that was like that exciting for us. But we looked at the large side and we're like, huh, there's a lot of weird stuff going on here, right? Like the planetary sciences Decatal had just come out. If you looked at the mission concept studies for like the 30 missions that they prioritize, you had these like large high power of spacecraft that cost anywhere from half a billion to two billion dollars.

And overlaid on that, we were like, wow, like all of these are made for, you know, smaller launch vehicles. And Starship is coming online. And just for shits and giggles, we like, there's like a, there's an equation that backs out basically cost. It's like a regression of run of every spacecraft. And it's like, you know, cost is a function of mass. And so we were like, oh, like, how massive of a spacecraft could we put in a starship? I said, okay, let's take like a 10-ton payload capacity vehicle, right? We'll call it, like, you know, maybe we'll say like 30-ton total mass, put it in this equation.

And it's like, ding-de-ding, you've come up with James Webb, right? Like, it's like a $15 to $20 billion thing. And we're like, okay, no one's going to put a $15 to $20 billion spacecraft in a $100 billion launch vehicle. And so we're like, huh, this is weird. Like, who's thinking about this? You know, kind of thought of Zee was like, this is interesting. We don't really know how we're going to do it,

but we know what the objective is, right? When we started this company, we were like, you know, at the end of the planetary sciences Decadal, they say 30 amazing missions that were prioritized by the scientific community, 10 that are like highly prioritized. And if NASA funding is maintained at level,

we'll do one, maybe two of these over the next 10 years. And so like our personal mission is like, we want to take one of those missions that wouldn't have happened in this decade and make it happen this decade. It's like an easy metric. for success, like, are we successful or not over this next 10-year period? I like that.

And everybody who joins our company is, like, signed up for it. We're going to do this. How we do it? TBD. We'll have to figure that out. But, you know, that's kind of like the objective. That's cool. I don't feel like I've heard of a lot of people thinking in that way where it's such an easily

stateable goal that you can work towards because it, I'm sure that's helpful in clarifying decisions. Yes. And I feel like, you know, probably your brother's brought a little bit of that from SpaceX where they did have these very straightforward goals that if it doesn't meet this metric, throw it out, figure out something else that does. Do you find that that's something you've picked up from elsewhere in the industry too, or you feel like no one really focuses in that particular way? You know, I think there's a decent number of companies now. So I

wanted to join an early stage space startup in 2018. I spent like six months talking every founder that would talk to me. And I felt like there was a lot of cool, cool stuff happening, but it wasn't clear about like the business model and where things were going. Part of that was just because launch costs were still crazy. You know, I felt like. and I hadn't hit the rate that it was hitting. Starship was still kind of a dream, right? And so I decided to go do something else for a few years and come back. When I look now, like, there's a bunch of people that are thinking about,

hey, what is the impact on the economics of launch being so low? And what are things that we can do different, right? And can we do like the really cool things that we want to do in space, but do it with an interesting business model? So I think it's becoming more realistic. But you kind of need to be a little, like you need to have like a certain element of realism. Like Neil and I say, like, we're taking practical steps towards the sci-fi future, right? You got to have that because if you don't, like, you're not going to ever make it to that, like, that end journey, right?

You got to have, like, for us, like, we're going to do scientific missions, right? That's the goal. Like 80% of our advisory board are all like people who, PIs, you know, like people like Lori Garver, like science background people. But we know that over the next few years, we're going to need to build it on commercial and national security starting out, prove it out, and then get to it. And I think most other companies that I'm talking to have that sense of realism, right? Like it's like, we want to do something really cool, but unfortunately that's kind of expensive. And the people that will give you money need you to actually be able to make money for them before they'll give it to you. Now, yeah, 2018 to 2020 was probably the different, that was the different beat where it's like,

I just show a hockey stick curve of how many things need to be launched in the next five years. And then don't mention that they're all the same three constellations and you'll be good. We're going to do one launch, one year. We're going to do 10 launches the next year. Yeah. And then next week, I'll launch every three hours. It'll be great. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it's funny you mentioned doing the regression thing on the cost per map. Like density of dollars, like, you know, on a satellite, right? Like where you're just like, well, if you want to get into a payload, you got to make it smaller. And so the things have to be lighter. So the metal is more expensive. And then you've got this miniaturization.

Then you got and everything gets to get smaller, smaller, smaller, and more dense, right? So you pack the same punch in a tiny space. but then the only way to relieve the pressure on that engineering curve is just cost, right? It just shoots straight up. So, like, is that a metric that you internalize as part of your entire business, or is that, like I said, was that just for fun? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think we kind of started on, okay, if we think we're about to move from what we call like an era of mass constraint where everything's optimized for mass, right, every decision you make on every level of vehicle is for mass. But we're about to go to an era of like mass abundance, right, where, hey, actually, now I don't need to optimize for mass.

Now I can actually the metric that should optimize for is cost. What happens to spacecraft design? And like Neil has this spreadsheet that's still like the core of our company, which is like every single part of the vehicle down to the reaction wheel. Like what could he do in a higher mass regime where he doesn't care about mass? And what could that do to the cost of it, right? And so, you know, and then like there's great examples on the solar side, right? When you're no longer optimizing for, you know, watt per kilogram,

but you're optimizing for like watt per dollar, right? And just like the trades get very different. And so we definitely, that was the big opportunity to realize, which is like, actually, if I have a lot of mass to play around with, spacecraft design gets really fun and actually gets, like, much more reasonable. Because to your point, so much of the cost structure of spacecraft and the payload has gone historically into figuring out how to do something that, like, takes up a lot more mass and a lot more power terresturally. But now I have, like, you know, one tenth of that in space. And so we see Starship, and frankly, F9 already has done this, has kind of removed. that limitation to a large degree. And we're doing it on the spacecraft side,

but we're working with a bunch of people on the payload side who are thinking about, like, wow, like, oh, I can start doing some really interesting things when I don't have to optimize for mass. Right, right, right. So, like, does that just end up, like, at the end of that equation, do you just end up with some, like, just big, dumb satellite, like, just like a huge, like, stainless steel box,

like, with, like, extension cords wired on the inside? Like, does that, you know, does it come up, like, looking like a garage sale satellite? It's, like, not too far from that, right? I mean, the engineering team outside is going to, like, kill me if I, like, say yes to them. But, like, it's definitely, like, more complicated. It was a dumb satellite. This is an outrage.

There's, like, there's, like, crazy hard engineering challenges. Like, how do you manage thermal when you have, like, that much surface area of aluminum? Right. Like, there's all sorts of engineering challenges that go into it. But, yeah, the goal is, yeah, when I have mass, I can use, like, you know, lower cost materials. I can make it a simpler structure. I can do all the things that I couldn't do historically because the cost was mass, right?

whether it's modularity, whether it's overspecking the vehicle to handle different use cases. Like, there's all sorts of things that get better in spacecraft design when you have mass to play around with. Do you end up with, like, big trust structures? That's something that would be like, like, you can just get really strong, dense metal that's cheap. I don't know, like stainless steel and then just fill it with a hole so you don't have a thermal problem. And then, yeah, I mean, there's still a thermal problems. But like we're trying to do like as much passive thermal management as possible. And that's like, it's our own little beast.

And like, Stefan, our thermal engineer is like, kind of. But yes, it's like it is massive, like, you know, massive structure, aluminum themes. Like when you see the pictures of it, you're like, okay, this is like our picture on our website, like looks kind of simplistic, but it actually is like relatively simplistic looking from the outside, right? It's what you can do when you have a lot of mass to play around with. Yeah. We're talking about this one.

Yeah. Yeah. And things have changed since, but like it's like it's not like crazy far off from that, right? Like it's, it's, it's, it gets a lot simpler when you have massive play around with. Hmm, okay. When you're kind of specking out the things that are on your plate versus your customers, how do you plan for people's payload constraints as well? Is that an area that it's like,

we're just selling you the stuff that goes around your special bits, or are the things that you're considering like K2's expertise area as well that you'd like to bundle into the buses that you're selling to customers? Yeah, I mean, we down the line we want to kind of own the end-to-end, integration, you know, mission management, everything. And so we'd like the customer just bring us a payload. We hope to design an interface that is like as simple as possible and that can kind of encompass the requirements of different payloads.

So a lot of our work the last 12 months has been talking to like different payload developers from, you know, commercial comms all the way through to like PI's thinking about some kind of like crazy out there, you know, mission that they want to do and seeing like what would be the payload requirements, right? And like from an interface perspective, like, you know, we're doing some interesting things like thinking about, like, we have this massive surface area. Can we have different plates that are removable that allows to have, like, a separable payload interface that we can just, like, send somebody to plate.

They can actually latch on the payload. And it's like a modular interface structure, right? Like, there's stuff like that you can do. Obviously, historically, you can do that because the cost was mass, but in a world where mass doesn't matter, like, you can start doing that kind of stuff. And so we'd like to be, we envision a future where the payload and, you know, integration is actually a lot easier. now that the proof will be in the pudding, right?

Like we have to go do this and see it and do it for one mission, do it for another mission. Like for our first mission 25, to test out that thesis with maybe three to four different types of payloads, right? And see if we can actually do what we think we can. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, because I guess you'd really want, that seems like kind of a, you know, I'm thinking about it now,

it seems like kind of like an inevitable path that you guys would have to take is that if you don't bring the payload, with you on this journey of blowing up your size and reducing your complexity and cost. And it's like it doesn't matter. Because otherwise you just, it's like this giant propulsion bus that's still sending a $1 billion or a casino to Jupiter or something, right? Like you still, you need to have the cost savings go on that as well. Right.

So I guess you just kind of end up with like Rocket Labs photon, but enormous, right? Yeah. Well, the interesting is, it's funny. Like there's one commercial comms player that we've been talking to that does their own pay, and I was strapped into one of the guys that's been responsible for almost every payload they were ever put in space. And he's like, our business right now has a terminal for space and has a terminal that we put on our vans on the ground. It's massive. And the difference between those two is basically mass.

And he's like, with your bus, I could maybe just take what I put on the van and throw it up on your bus and put in space. Like a bit of an exaggeration base. Like there's like a minimal amount of things that I need to do. And I kind of want to try that out and see like what we learn. Right. So that's what gets me excited. like, oh, like, what are the things that we can actually take off the ground, huck up in space? And there's probably some level of stuff we have to do, but it's probably a lot less than what we have to do historically.

And when you look at the kinds of customers that you're selling to, like everybody's moving to constellations to some regard, right? Whether that's a couple of satellites, if you're, you know, some sort of specialized imaging company or you're putting up thousands. the picture that we showed was sort of flat-packed looking. So, you know, do you still envision that as like, how many of these can we stack in a starship to populate a plane? Is that why it's super, super short like that compared to how wide it is? Or is that just because, like, if you built it taller, you would have no idea what else to put in it because it's too big.

Yeah, so, I mean, if you look at a transport emission today, those pictures are like, first of all, just awesome, right? You've got this train to space and there's all these different companies that are going. So that strikes me as really cool. What strikes me kind of weird is like how much empty space is there, right? Like the volume doesn't feel to be being used in F9. And I think a similar dynamic will exist if we don't figure it out for Starship. And so our mega class satellite is made to multi-manifest in a Falcon 9.

And so it's made to fit 8 to 10 in a single F9. It stacks. Obviously it will depend on like the volume of the payload. but for like most communications payloads, which are like probably our first customers either on the national security side or the commercial side, you can stack them, right? And that's kind of the goal.

There's an idea with what we're offering, which is, hey, rather than put hundreds or thousands of satellites in Leo where each satellite is maybe, you know, five kilowatts of power, put fewer in higher orbits and have them be kind of better made, you know, in terms of like Delta V for collision avoidance, end of life, all that kind of stuff and actually have a better path to operating in space sustainably.

And so that's kind of like what that model is. Like the mega class is made for multi-manifested existing like Falcon 9 and equivalence built in a way that's like taking up the full payload volume and the full payload mass in a way that really only Starlink is doing today, right? They're probably the only ones that have fully optimized

like that for obvious reasons. And then the giga class, like we've got a few versions of it. We've got like, so first of all in Starship our megaclass fits 40. So it's like 40 satellites, Each one is like 20 kilowatts of power. It just starts like where you know 20 kilowatts, five set three was 26 kilowatts right, one of the most powerful satellites ever.

So Starship is so big that we can basically put 40 of them in a single starship and put it in orbit, right? Like that's kind of ridiculous. And then our giga class will be like 100 kilowatts of power, right? And you know, we're thinking about how many we could stack in a starship, but like that gets kind of crazy, right? Like it's like the amount of power that you can deploy in orbit gets kind of unreal. Isn't that like not that much less than the entire International Space Station?

Isn't that like, hold on, I'm looking this up. Because I feel like these most recent arrays, it's like, all right, give me a second to look, Jake. Yeah, because those old arrays are like actually, they're not that powerful anymore, right? Because they're, oh, they're just old, right? I think that's the big thing. So like that was in the earlier days of solar tech before we got a little bit better at it, right? So, yeah, I can imagine that they are super. super productive.

Well, Anthony's looking that up. I have a question. So, you know, we're talking about payload and volume, and these two things are the two mistresses of putting something in space, right? If you're a rocket. And every rocket's got a different kind of ratio of what they can do.

We can take this much volume and this much mass. And so if you combine those together, you'd have like a mass per, I don't know, per cubic meter or something. Do you, my question, is when you look at the rocket market and you're trying to design your spacecraft to sort of like maximize that because you don't want to have a thing where like, well, we can only fill out half an F9 because we're too heavy and you don't want a thing where you're like where we can't fill the whole thing up, whatever. You know, you want to kind of like line up. Does the fact that Falcon 9 basically runs the show in terms of the launch market, does that impact your decision? Like do you optimize for any specific rocket at this point, even if you're trying to stay agnostic to the other ones? Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's something we grapple with, right? So for a mega class, we're like, we're trying to be launch vehicle agnostic.

We're asking for every launch vehicle provider's, you know, pay for the user guy. We're building within those requirements. But the only game in town right now is Falcon 9, right? To say otherwise is, you know, to be a little bit, you know, delusional. Not everyone like to say it out loud, but like Falcon 9 is just, it's like the rocket. That's what rockets are now, you know? Yeah. And it's, it's like, I mean, it's not great for anyone that wants to be

put stuff in space to be dealing with someone that has like the full market, right? We need competition there. And so we're all hoping there is competition. But like we are right now optimizing first for Falcon 9, but also, I mean, as like we keep talking to different launch players and they're all going bigger, right? So there's, they're all coming and the question is just when. So we want to make sure we can have that option for our customers, right, to be able to use the mega class on that.

Now, the giga class, it's Starship in New England. That's it. Right. There's nobody else that's really come out with like that. Yeah, yeah. And really the limiting factor is like the payload diameter, right, versus the actual like mass. And so we're building it for those two and, you know, we'll see what happens and when they come online. Yeah, yeah.

Actually, this is my other question to follow up on that too, is it like, is there a trend in sort of like, I've never done the math on this, but like, do bigger rockets keep that same sort of ratio just like as a rule or as, you know, I guess because volume goes up a factor of three, but mass I don't know, factor of how good your engine is. Like, do the bigger rockets have like a, oh, they're generally more volume happy rather than mass happy? I don't even know what that looks like. Yeah. When you mentioned kilogram for like cubic meter, I was like, I haven't actually looked at that. Like, I would look to see like one that looks like cross-launch vehicles. So I think I might take that somewhere and try to see what that is. You can send your check.

I'll send my address and you can send the complexation check over. I'll send you a letter on how to adjust at least one of the rocket's capabilities because I have heard not encouraging things about New Glens mass. in terms of its comparison to volume. I'm a little suspect on what's going on there. There's so much uncertainty about the launch vehicle capabilities. And then you see, like, Elon just tweeted like a month ago, like, oh, yeah, we're getting 30% more out of Raptor engines.

And you're like, okay, well, if you do the math on that, that means the payload to orbit is no longer 150 tons, it's 200 tons. Like, okay, well, that's crazy, right? My assumption all along has been like Starship will end up being double whatever they start at anyway. Like, that's just, they've got a good track record for figuring that one out. I won't be shocked. And then my other base assumption of the future of Rockets is whatever Rocket Lab is telling you right now,

they're just completely understating what they're actually working on. And like, the newest visualization of Neutron is like, there's something going on there. Like, let me pull this up because something doesn't make sense. Who had the picture? Was that like a Sheets situation? Michael Sheets had the newest. He had a comparison. side by side. Let me look it up.

It'll be on ready. Is it the one where the neutron is like slowly transforming into another starship, just like everything else? Yeah, it's got the new legs, but then also like the, here we go. All right, I'm pulling this up. This is the picture at the moment. And if you compare this to what it used to be, it just appears as if the upper stage has disappeared entirely.

So I'm like, no, this isn't right. Like this faring's too short. stage is too short for as wide of a vehicle as this is. Something's going on here. I don't currently believe it. You can check back in with me later if I'm right or wrong. But this visualization makes no sense to me. Yeah.

It's, first of all it's been fascinating to watch Neutron evolve, right? Like all the different iterations of it. But my brother and I were talking about this most recent one and we're like, it's almost as if they're envisioning like an upper stage that's like what impulse is working on that fits in it. Right. It's like a totally separate view. And you're like, oh, like, why are they choosing that? And like, what's going on there?

Yeah. Yeah, it's not super clear. I think they're just sandbagging and it'll be totally different when it actually flies and it'll be way better. That's my straight up assumption. Of course, you should be designing everything for Rocket 4 out of Astra. That's like the real, that's the one thing you're missing. No comment. The market that you're entering into is all.

also at a really interesting moment because like we talked about, everyone's jumping on constellations. And that was true for like the commercial constellations, you know, Starlink, Kuiper, all that kind of stuff. But the Department of Defense has been like, okay, now we're going to do constellations too. And they're doing this strategy where they're buying a bunch of satellites from everyone with certain payloads that interconnect. Have you, you mentioned defense as a primary market in the early days. Have you come up with a strategy on how to play in the new world? of the way they're doing acquisitions, which is, you know, kind of satellite bus agnostic.

Your strategy obviously plays into that in some regard, but do you feel like there's a specialized version that you would need to offer in the way that SpaceX has offered Star Shield? Is that the right? Star Shield. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny.

Like, if you look at what, like, so we have some government contracts that we'll be announcing probably the next month or two, but we've been awarded. If you look at what they said and what they've told us, it's we need to go cheaper, faster, and with lower NRE, right? And like the words before that were go smaller to go cheaper, faster with lower NRA. And, you know, I've talked to people there, and a lot of that is because no one thinks

it's possible to go larger and do what we're doing. And so a lot of what we need to do is prove that's possible. But if you look at like high power assets, right, if we need to deploy high power assets in orbit today, or say we're in a situation where we need to accelerate that, like our rate of production of the satellites that are over 15 kilowatts power is like one every two years, right? Probably like slightly worse across all the primes. And so I think people are noticing that that's a pretty significant gap. And a gap that our smaller satellite, the megaclass, fits really nicely because what we're envisioning is being able to do 20 kilowatts of power, but be able to produce it in one to two years and basically have a line, like mass producing them and they're coming off the line, right?

And so that fits a really interesting need, both within the DoD end user and the commercial kind of communications and users. So they're thinking about different constellation architecture, right? Like, hey, I maybe can't go do what SpaceX did with Starlink because I don't own the launch vehicle. So I probably can't go do a thousand thousands of satellites in Leo. But how do I deploy, you know, throughput in orbit? Well, maybe I do fewer higher-powered satellites in a slightly higher orbit. Maybe I revisit the business case on the Mio constellation. Maybe I think we've got proliferated geo.

And those are not being the latest headline in space news of this is the most expensive, powerful satellite that's ever been thought of. Exactly. Exactly. Every time, there's been one of those a year. Like, oh, now it's this is the one. It's only insured for $8 billion, but they got them this time. Yeah. Yeah.

So, like, yeah, that's the idea. It's like maybe we can start doing that without, you know, blowing out the budget. And if those satellites cost, you know, 15 to 30 million instead of, you know, 500 million, what are the things that we can now do? And that's where, you know, different national security and users are thinking about, you know, that kind of capability. Why do you think it drifted in the other direction where everyone broke the constellations down into more smaller satellites?

Is it, again, purely a cost thing that they realized for an overall throughput? They could just actually acquire things quicker or cheaper by breaking it up more. but that comes with the, you know, obviously need that you need to buy 90 launch vehicles if you're Amazon. Yeah. I think there's just like so many reasons. How much time do we have? So I think one of them is, first of all, like the success of SpaceX has caused everyone to be like, okay, can we do something similar, right?

The second is like on a per unit cost, just from a speed perspective, right, being able to like not have a situation where you're waiting four years and paying a billion dollars for your satellite. and hoping that everything goes right, like going the opposite direction, it makes a lot of sense, right? Like, I can just turn these out. They're $5 to $10 per satellite. If I can get the cost down into like two and a half per satellite,

that's great, right? What I think people didn't, you know, aren't thinking as much about is like the actual tradeoff. Like, cool, you have something that's one-tenth of price, but like if the power is like 120th, the power, your throughput, right? And like, what matters is gigabits in orbit per dollar, right? Actually gets a lot worse.

And so the way you cover that is, yeah, you have to just do a massive number of them. You have to think about, like, you know, full global coverage based on, you know, what orbit you're in. And it becomes an interesting, interesting mass. Yeah, I'm a little biased here. So, like, but I think people are, like, I think more and more of these constellations are going to realize that actually a small satellite architecture won't work for them in Leo. And they're going to need to think about, like, how do they deploy, you know, the throughput they want in orbit in a different way, in a different way, potentially fewer, more powerful satellites, potentially different. orbits. Yeah, I think that's, it's going to be interesting. And, you know, and, and, you know, and it's a comment about like Kuiper, right? Like, Kuiper is going to be like the, like, if,

if Kiper doesn't work, no one, like, I think everyone's going to really be like, oh, this, this doesn't work, right? And so I'm curious how the next few years evolve with these mega constellations. Yeah, the latency that's mentioned as well as like the consideration there. Yeah. And for years, the offers that are, you know, we're providing internet to airplanes and stuff that were these really high latency operations, geo-based or obviously even the latency to like the earth-based things is not good either. See also, you know, the entire previous generation of internet in the air. Do you do any calculations there to say like, I'm betting that people don't care about 20 as much and 40 is fine for most people's use cases.

Or is that something that you're like, it doesn't really matter because the business cases also have to close, so people will be okay with 40 milliseconds as long as they're paying a certain amount for their end service. Yeah, we've gone back and forth. We're just having a long conversation about this yesterday internally with the team. And I think there's going to be segmentation. Like, for those they care about latency, the certain type of architectural work, but there are, like, not everybody cares about latency. And what some care about is just, like, massive amounts of throughput at a low cost, right? Because there are use cases where that matters. So I think we're going have like two tiers of constellations where some are optimized for latency and some are optimized

just for like straight up throughput. The difference is if you're optimizing for throughput historically, like the answer was like the biggest, most expensive satellite in geo. And I think, you know, with what we're building, maybe there's going to be interesting alternatives to that. Or even a system that is two tiered alone where they have, and there's a lot of operators that are trying to buy up each other to end up at this like multi-orbit thing where you actually have a constellation that provides you low latency, but once you've certainly, searched your way through Netflix, then you're getting it off the high throughput stuff in Mio, which has longer latency, but you don't notice because you're just watching, you know,

friends or whatever one's watching. What's the new one on Netflix? Suits. Suits is number one on Netflix or something now? I don't know. It always changes some show that I haven't seen yet. Huh. Okay, so when we think about a new paradigm of enormous cheap satellites, is there, are there any new

use cases that emerge from that capability, or is it just like all the existing use cases just got cheaper? Like, is there anything kind of special and different that arises from that? Yeah. What are you guys hoping for? I think it's a mix of both. So the manga class satellite, which is for like F9, I think it's more the former, which is like just everything gets cheaper, right? Like you're just, and but cheaper is interesting because like one of our, one of our advisors, Rob Lillis, he's a PI for Escapade, Mr. Mission Mars. He had proposed a mission called Mosaic, those included in the Decadal study, that basically wanted to have solved the issue of there not being enough comms infrastructure around Mars.

And what he envisioned was like 10 satellites in a Falcon Heavy made up of one mother ship and nine small sats. And that had a certain amount of capacity. and was going to cost about $4.5 billion. Didn't make it through, right, for a $4.5 billion mission to Mars for a bunch of reasons. Yeah. Right. And so we've been playing around a bit with that and saying, hey, if you had a starship, right,

and you could just put like eight of our megaclass satellites at the bottom where the top four have like all the volume we could possibly want for whatever payload you want. You can do that exact same mission, but have like 10x the throughput at, you know, a $400 million cost point, right? And if we could convince people to actually buy data on a per gigabyte basis and I could go raise private capital, we could do this a totally different way, right? Like we could just go say like, hey, let us do the infrastructure and you pay us on a per use basis, right? Yeah. So it's a little bit of both, right? It's like, yeah, it's lower cost. But because it's lower cost, the capability and like the type of mission you're able to do is completely different, right?

And then there's crazy stuff like with the gigaclass, when you have 100 kilowatts of power, you know, I'm kind of intrigued by we're talking to a bunch of the, more sci-fi startups that are doing everything from like in space manufacturing, welding, like building megastructures, right? And like that stuff becomes possible when you have a lot of payload volume, a lot of payload mass, and a lot of power, right? And so I'm pretty excited to see that.

And then like even further out, like, as you scale up, I don't know if you ever read like that Casey Hammer has like this amazing blog about why you think space-based solar power doesn't make sense, right? And it's really really well done. Yeah. It's really well-out. Yeah. And he's a bunch of boys that are like fantastic.

We got to get him on the show, Jake. You should. But I'm curious. He's in the Discord. He is in the Discord. Yeah. He may be watching right now or later. So hello, Casey.

So I'm kind of intrigued like what changes? Like what part of the premise or the assumptions that went into that because it makes a total sense. What flex is when we're now operating at a totally different mass regime, right? Right. And a totally different cost regime. I think they will happen. There's a bunch of, you know, companies that are working.

working on at some that are installed that are thinking about different ways to solve that problem. And I'm kind of like, that's like a really new capability that will only come online when we're operating in, you know, like a post-Starship world. Right, right, right, right. Has anyone never, like, kind of dreamed up what the solar electric propulsion system looks like with the giga class, like with that much power? Like, can you just slap like a hundred of those ion engines on something and just go to, like, Alvesantari?

Like, so it's funny for 400 years and you just go to anywhere in the galaxy. Like, you know, what is that like? It's funny that you mentioned that.

So, Rafael Martinez, I love it. We had, just had Rafael, join our team. He had helped develop the thruster system, EP thruster system for Starlink.

And then was an early engineer at Apollo Fusion. And he just joined us because he wants to build an EP system for massive, massive vehicles, right? And so, when he told us that was what he did. he was interested in, we were like, all right, I think this is a good fit here. And we're thinking about exactly that. So we're developing right now a 20-kil-watt EP system, which would be, if we put in space, we're hoping to put in space in 2025, would be the largest, at least in terms of publicly available

information ever deployed. And so we are definitely thinking about, okay, like, how many of those can we put on not only the giga, but also the mega, right? And what does that mean in terms of missions from a planetary science perspective, right? And things start to get pretty interesting, right? Like, you could start, part of, like, that mission that was talking about, like, we doing Mosaic relies on the EP capabilities that we're talking about, right?

Yeah. I'm just pulling up, like, that would be really big. 20 kilowatts, did you say? Is that what you said for the end? Yes. Because, like, what was Dawn? That's literally what I was just pulling up. I think it was, like, nothing.

Yeah, I can't remember now. I think they're maybe like sub-kilawatt. I can't remember now. Anyway, you look that up. Well, yeah. I have the Newton rating. What's the Newton to? Let me circle back to the ISS numbers that I looked up and totally forgot to bring up.

The ISS pre-update was 160 kilowatts post-i-190 watts. update 210. Yeah, 210, 215. So, yeah, like two of your big boys is an ISS. The PPE, when that was still the name of it, the thing that's going to power gateway, they had that at 60 kilowatts of power generation, and it says 50 of which can be dedicated to propulsion. But I don't know in what increment, because that's, I think, a couple of different thrusters,

right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the thrust is a 10 or 12 kilowatt thruster from work. That sounds right. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty wild. Yeah. I mean, that'd be awesome, right? I think you could probably really open up some interesting planetary ideas that were maybe a little at a reach before if you had access to a reasonably well-costed high power propulsion system, right? Like, is that how we get our Pluto orbiter or our, you know, things like that, right?

I mean, Pluto will be a little bit hard with solar, but hey, there's also a bunch of people that are working on, you know, making nuclear reactors a bit smaller. And I'd love everybody, like all of our planetary science missions to have like a five to 10 ton nuclear reactor on it, right? And like, that gets interesting. And part of like, that's another one of the things that historically has been really hard because of mass. But hey, if we don't care as much about mass, now that game starts getting kind of interesting. And there's a number of players that are all working in different ways to bring that mass down. all in the hopes eventually deploy them in space at scale.

So, like, then the combination of that makes, like, something like Pluto become really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. We do need, I don't even think about nuclear, but now we need a nuclear reactor-powered K2 bus. I don't know what that looks like. Oh, yeah.

I want it. It's in the road now. It's in the road now. It's in a real. Yeah, yeah. The mass is what keeps coming up. But on the volume side of things, are there any volume-specific applications? Like, there's, was it, who was the company that announced they were going to build antenna for Nucal N sizes?

I'm trying to remember. Was it, one of the manufacturers was like, we're going to make 7 meter. I'm just looking up a lot of stuff on the show. The show is mostly Anthony Googling stuff. Custom antenna. I thought somebody did this. Somebody announced this a couple years back. I feel I don't remember that.

Went almost nowhere, I feel like, at this point. But anyway, there's other applications that do well with larger volumes or larger sizes. Like synthetic aperture radar, the bigger you get, the better. Creepy satellites that the NRO may or may not fly that are like 100 meters across could get way bigger if we launch things in bigger farings. Kilometer size and a raise, right? So what are the volume things that you're looking at in terms of use cases? And is that change how you approach certain cuts?

customers like the NRL, for example. It actually makes a lot of things on like the larger side for everything you just described, right? Like a lot of the complexity of those businesses has been how do I build this complex, segmented payload that fits into a smaller volume and then expands out to as large as possible, right? Kind of remove that. I mean, or you take it to the next degree. You're just like, now I pack it down on this bigger thing.

Now we just do it one bigger. Right. Yeah. So those are the interesting options. I mean, the thing that excites us the most is like, kind of what actually started us on this, like part of what started us on this journey. So when we were looking at the large bus market, one of our advisors, Avi Chabotty, who was X-Basex, now he's at Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, he was like, there's just really like, you know,

an interesting, wonky idea of like taking a large six-meter monolithic mirror and putting it in a starship. And, you know, it's something that's historically been for ground-based telescopes, putting in starship, but I can't find a bus for it, right? And so, like, we were like, oh, maybe we should think about that. And so there's really interesting, like, just thinking about, like, what you would normally have just said was reserve terrestrial. And now I can scale up and do some cool astrophysics.

And, like, my favorite is, okay, let's take it to its extreme. Like, let's have a bunch of these, you know, six meter mirrors and build an even bigger mirror and, like, how big do you have to go to be able to see, like, the mountain ranges of exoplanets, right? Like, that's a fun, that's a fun exercise. And that becomes possible with something, like, start. ship, right? Yeah, you better get your pointing IMU's real, real good if you want to get going on that.

The camera jinger is going to be insane on that picture. All sorts of fun-titter challenges. Yeah, I feel like that's like, you know, the 20 year from now problem, but that's the kind of stuff. Yeah, whatever company is going to figure that one out. Oh, man. Yeah, that'd be really cool. I mean, you could theoretically do JWST for not $10 billion, right?

right, if you could just make one big monolithic mirror. So, yeah, we never would do that. We would just do one with as many mirrors as it has. Another 10 billion, but it would be 50 meters across. 100% the way it always works is, okay, we've done something way cheaper. Let's do the same thing we were going to do for cheaper. Or what if we use the same amount of money? Like, what can we do now?

Like that's the ratcheting effect of not only just space. That's like the general way it's stuff goes. I guess that's not necessarily bad either, right? It's not. Like you got to do that or else we would have never got that. where we're at. Totally. And I've heard a bunch of, like, deferring opinions on, like, whether you could actually achieve, like, JWST level performance.

and the answer is, like, likely, no. Like, likely what you, the best you could get is, like, a 50% performance, but you can put six of them in, you know, in space, right? And so rather than having capacity constraint, like, there's some use cases where maybe you don't need the full JWST, you just need the 50% version. At least having that option, I think, would be great, right? And having that. It's an interesting question.

that I like wrestle with a lot because like science stuff like applications are often like forget about the satellite but just the the scientific pursuit itself is often very like unique and bespoke and weird and and like the concept of like can we mass produce science is something that I like to think about all the time we have many vigorous debates about it constantly like you know like would would one perseverance be better than 10 that were 25% as good like I don't know I don't know what the what the answer is there like you get more data. Like, you get more bits, but like, are they good bits? Are they solving the bits? You know, to solve the questions that you want to solve? I don't know, right? I'd rather fight one horse-sized

perseverance. Right, right? Or, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's definitely the path that we want to go. Like, we dream of, like, there being a planetary program, right? Where we're just, like, if you look at what's the optimization, usually there's all sorts of trades around which instruments matter the most for the destination that we're going to. Well, yeah, if we have, mass to play around with, what if we just put a bundle of them and we have enough power to play around with? What if we put the same bundle, right? And what if we overspec the vehicle for the different environments, right? And what if we thought about like power and over respect that as well

so we can handle different destinations? Well, suddenly you're now like in a world where you can maybe start mass producing these, something that we've always wanted to do but never been able to, right? And maybe have like 80% standard 20% customized instead of the other way around. Yeah. I don't envy you trying to solve that problem because like every planet is it's some special snowflake and they got all sorts of weird weird shit going on in every atmosphere on a heavy surface, right? I almost wonder if it's going to like segment kind of the way you talked about constellations. Like is there going to be just like this group of science is like, no, these are always going

to be special snowflake Cassini ideas. And then, but then like, well, you know, on this side, maybe it would be nice to have 100 different seismometers on every corner of Mars and we can just mass produce that or whatever and go. Yes. I think that's where we're going. I mean, our goal is not to, like, I don't think we'll ever go after like the large large cost cap missions. Like our goal would be like, hey, let's do like a massive amount of science out of like the 250 million dollar missions or, you know, the hundred million dollar missions. That'd be really cool, right? Yeah. Yeah. Isn't imaging, Earth imaging a good example of this though? Because up until recently, the only great imagers that were up there were the multi-billion dollar NRO spy satellites. And then we all paid our own money to download imagery of Russia invading Ukraine from like every little tiny imaging satellite. And like, like,

Yeah, they probably could see what hubcaps the tanks had on them and stuff. But, like, we could see that there were tanks, and that certainly helped us track it enough. Yeah, yeah, yes. And it was a great example, you know, even – and not to, like, say the NRO wasn't interested in that before, because they've been talking for years about buying commercial imagery. But now I feel like every third month there's – like, now we have a new program to buy SAR imagery data from the commercial. Now we're actually going to look at buying images of satellites from other satellites

from the commercial industry. And that segment has exploded. they still send up Zuma and whatever else is up there. There's all these mysterious things they send up. That didn't completely replace the need for that. But I don't think if you sent your armada of communications satellites to Mars, NASA wouldn't be like, we didn't build it so we won't buy your bits. They would totally buy your bits.

And they would also send some that serve their own bits as well, because why not? Like, you should have multiple things. I guess the question becomes, is the market for, planet's, planet labs, images bigger than the market for, you know, climate data from Mars. And it's like, yeah, probably. Yes. Don't tell planet, but. Let planet at least develop their Mars constellation first, Jake, before we start

dissuading them from doing that. One of our early shows we talked about that. Remember that way, it was like episode like single digit with time? Yeah, I think it was like the flamingo, is that what it was called? The flying around Mars. Mars planet, yeah. Yeah. You're already here for it.

I want the credit for that. Do you look around, so I think it was probably at the same Tiki party that we were at at Space Symposium where there were some people from Gravitics who are building large volume space station modules that are meant to be sized for Starship as well.

And I talked to them at the show and it kind of felt like a similar inspiration of like, all right, let's be the ones that consider what happens if this all works out. And the analogy I always use is, if you read some writing from the early days of Google, one of the things that they thought was like, let's just assume that a certain segment of the stuff that's really expensive now is either going to be free or so cheap that it's basically free for our business model. And how would we build an architecture then?

And they thought, you know, thousands of really cheap servers that could do better than one really exquisite one. And you all are kind of in the same ballpark. It's like, yeah, I know we're all going to debate Starship or this or that, but like, let's just be optimistic and say it works out, then what? So do you have any interaction with them in particular, or are there others in the industry that you're watching to see how they, how they, you know, kind of make their way in the same idea? Yeah, I mean, like, part of the reason why we started this company was we felt if it was left up to not new companies and new entrants, Starship would be operational, you know, available for everybody in 2026. and the first large spacecraft used for science would happen in, you know, 20, 40, right? And so, like, we wanted to accelerate that.

And the good thing is there's a bunch of other companies. So gravidics is amazing. Like, they're doing cool stuff. They're thinking about it in a different way. Similar thesis, like, what do we use? How do we use mass? Vast is also along the same kind of path, thinking about how do we use the full and there is a massive amount of X-Pasexers over there.

Astrolab is another interesting example of doing the trade, but doing the trade for a rover, right? I no longer care about mass, and how do I drive down the cost and drive up kind of reliability of the vehicle? So there's a bunch of different companies that are going after it, which is really exciting. Like, that's kind of what we want to see.

We want to see more people going after it so that we start seeing whenever Star Trek is operational, like the industry is ready to take advantage of it, right? We're not waiting a decade to do that. It's cool, too, because none of you are, like, this is not a cutthroat situation. Like, if one of you work out, you're going to need the other ones to be there

to do other parts of the industry, and there's definitely a rising tide situation in that hopeful future. Yeah, and, you know, like, commercially, too, like, we need to convince SpaceX that there's a business case for using Starship, not just for Starlink for missions of Mars, right? So it's like we need to build a pez dispenser. Please, real, real payload. You must fit your rover through this Pez deS sensor, right? That would be so funny.

We could launch the most volume ever, but it has to fit through this tiny door. And otherwise... So it's good. Like I think it's, and frankly, like, space is hard enough. There's going to, if this all happens, there's going to be more than enough opportunity. Like, there's no, there's no point. And we're all pretty helpful and pretty supportive of each other as we build this thing. And some former coworkers, right?

Or even like not so recently former, like, there's some people married to others that are still at SpaceX. So, yeah, it's pretty cozy. Well, I mean, this is, I know, this is cool. I'm really excited about this. You know, I have this. one of my favorite sayings is that nobody wants to drill what they want as a whole, right? And the drill is just how you get it. And I've been saying that about rockets because we're obsessed with rockets.

Nobody wants a rocket. What they want is some application in space. Perseverance team didn't want an Atlas 5. They wanted to find out whether there's been life on Mars. And that's just one thing they get there. So your company is finally moving down that spectrum away from like the rocket launch to like what we're actually doing. And I think that's super bad. So I wish you guys the best.

I hope this really takes off. I appreciate that. The last question is why is it not called K3? Because I'm counting the Ks in your names. Yeah, yeah. Either Niels left out or your first name is left out. My first name is definitely left out. So there's really two reasons why.

I didn't even think about the K3 thing. And I realized later on and I feel kind of embarrassed that people can see my name is Karan conjur. They think I just named this company for myself. If you were, honestly, if you were K3, you would be one better than L3. That's true. You'd be one up the chain.

The number is played out. You should just call it KKK and then it would be really result. It's really good. This is so good. We did a 9-11 joke last time. We're doing this joke now. This is great. You're doing such good work in the daytime.

The real reason actually we're called K2 is partly the last main thing, but it's more like, it's all ties back to the hardship scale, right? Like we're like, you know, a type 1, K1 civilization can harness the power of the planet, a type 2 or K2 civilization can harness the power of the solar system. And you know, you look at that, you know, like, our logo is a Dyson sphere, right? Like everything that you see that a K2 civilization supposedly has is big in space, right? It's not, you know, it's not small satellites. It's massive structures.

And the only way we're going to be able to achieve that is by learning how to build big stuff cheaply in space. Right. And so that's kind of what we want to do is like figure out how to deploy a lot of power, a lot of payload mass and a lot of payload volume so that we can start making those steps towards being a type 2 card. civilization. This ended up way better than I thought that shitty question would start. I thought it was going to be like, well, no, we climbed that

mountain and we were up there when we thought of it, so we just came to K2. But there was already a copyright on K, so we just iterated it. Turns out Elon Owensk.com. She's going to buy LinkedIn, and it'll be K.com.

Where should people follow? long if they are not fanatics yet. I mean, you got a website, but is there, are you, as you start building some stuff, are you going to be posting elsewhere? We'll be posting. I've been told that we need to increase our Twitter presence. We've been focusing too much on building satellites and not as much on our social media presence. So, yeah, Twitter, we've got a handle there, follow us there, and we'll be posting stuff. We also post on them. We did a decent amount as well. But those would be the best places plus the website. The theory I have not unveiled to you that you just confirmed by being too focused on building satellites and not enough on posting content is that one day will be bought by Rocket Lab.

So congrats. You have now confirmed my theory that that is what's going to happen. Yeah. Who knows? Dela and I have a vision of what we want to do. We'd like to build it. And we're going to do whatever it takes to achieve that vision. And that might take a while.

So we'll see. Cool. Cool. Jake. What do you got? That was cool. I got exactly what I wanted out of this conversation. Thank you. Yes. That's good. And you even got a Mars cons infrastructure out of it, which is even what an upgrade. We got, we got a. So the next time we do this, we have like, you know, a few drinks in, this is giving you a much less productive discussion. I think we focused to put all the content in this one. Yeah. Get all the business out of the way. Yeah. Yeah. I'm agreed.

do it IRL at a tiki bar at Space Symposium is the way it sounds cool it's impossible to get into that tigy bar you've got to walk through three other bars and down into a basement and you'll at least four times think you're in the wrong spot but eventually you'll get there and it'll be a great time Jake yeah so okay well that's where that happens I'm gonna I'm gonna make it one day I promise we mentioned Casey Hamers in the discord Jake please you got to plug the discord though so if anyone else wants to also come to the Discord and talk about whether we need a drill or we need a hole or whatever.

There are weird argument we're happening at any given time. You can come to Offnom.com slash Discord for as little as $5 a month or at $25 a month if you're like more of a giga class anomaly. You can support us and help us make shows like this and keep going. A rebrand of the Neverfly ride share tier. This is great. You never fly right here because you've got to fill the whole payload bay with your enormous satellite buses. Mass doesn't matter to you. So remove some from your wallet and send it to us.

Karan, thanks for hanging out. Even as it is out there, I hope the rest of your day is more productive than mine will be. And next time, have something cooler in the window than a trash can. That's your goal. That's the goal. That's the goal. You know, ambition, mission taken. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week. Oh, wait. Who's that? Next week, Jake. Did we, we didn't plug next week. Yeah, next week we're going to talk about lunar landers because we got some, we got some landing attempts coming.

Next week, we got both the Russian Luna 25 and the Indian Chandrayan three are making a go for it. So we're going to see if this bad luck streak continues and then, or if we're going to get a lander on the surface, we have Mark Panning joining us. So Mark Panning is a former member of the Insight team. So he's like a, you know, a geophysicist kind of guy. and he's a PI of a new mission that's going to the moon, Far Side Seismic Suite,

and that's going to be flying on Eclipse mission. And so we're going to get his perspectives on, you know, how the landings went and why is it hard and how's Clips going to do it differently? And we'll get into all that kind of fun stuff. It's going to be a blast. Yeah. We'll see you Thursday, y'all.

Bye. Bye. See you. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.