Off-Nominal - 138 - Double SPAC

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Will Francis, Chief Commercial Officer at Agile Space Industries, to talk about his path through the industry—from co-founding Roccor, to being acquired by Redwire, to joining Agile—and what he’s learned along the way.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeAgile Space IndustriesRedwire Space | Heritage + InnovationRedwire Acquires Roccor, a Manufacturer of Critical Systems for the Satellite Industry | Redwire SpaceFollow WillWilliam Francis, CCO — Agile Space IndustriesWilliam Francis | LinkedInFollow 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. Hello, buddy. Happy Thursday, Jake. How's it going? Hello. Hey there. Hello. We've got a long-awaited guest who I definitely missed at least one to two emails from you at some point along the way. And then emailed you back and was like, oh, my gosh, I've missed these emails very long ago.

Please, please let's get you on the show. Please forgive me. Please forgive me. It is Will Francis himself. How's it going? I'm honored to be here. It's going great. Thank you.

You've got a very appropriate background as well. A lot of Colorado propaganda. Yeah, I'm a Colorado native, so I love Colorado. It's a great state. It's one of my favorites. In my power ranking, it's, it's probably, you know, it's top five for sure. I think where exactly it sits. Top five?

That's pretty good. I love it. Yeah, because it's great all the time. Anytime you go there, it's great. You know, there's not a season that sucks. So it's very true. Yeah. It's very true.

And it's importantly, Jake, it's unlike your criteria of there's not a season that sucks and all the seasons are the same. They're all different and they're all different. That's the thing. So I know you hate seasons down there. Yeah, I like 50 weeks of summer and two weeks of early fall. That's my criteria. You don't swim in those. Yeah, I don't swim during our year.

Close the pool. Close the pool. the pool during early fall and then back on two weeks later. But I'm a weirdo. We just had a week of near zero temperatures here so I can relate to warm weather. Sounds great. Yeah, all my family back home in Alberta and Canada are not having a good go of it these last couple weeks. It's been very, very cold. Snow days and cold, like cold days, not snow days, just cold days. Like, not safe to be out. side. Don't come to school, don't come to work. That's something for a prairie Canadian to say

that it's not safe to go outside. Well, other things that may or may not be cold, Jake, our drinks. There we go. How's that? Landed the plane. A plus segue. Love it. What did you gather over there in Colorado? It's a little earlier on your side of things. It's a little early, so I made it Manhattan. and I made it pretty small. But, you know, it's not my favorite drink. I do love Manhattan's, but I knew we were going to talk about my history with Roe Corr a little bit. And it was kind of our official drink at Roe Corp.

It seems like one of our founders, Doug Campbell, was really into Manhattan. So we would often, as the company grew, we would make Manhattans on a Friday evening. And as the company grew, it gets to be, I'd make five, and then I'd make 12. and then I'd make 20 and then I gave up. I had to pass on the torch. People had to make your own Manhattons. But yeah, Manhattan's something like the, can you feed the whole team with a pizza theorem of like, can you reasonably make this many Manhattan's as when your company starts changing?

Absolutely. It's probably a good metric. I just love the attitude of it's early so I made a Manhattan and it's only a single. They're small. I'll probably sit this slow, but I can have some work to get done yet today. Okay, good. What you got down there, Jake?

I got myself a craft beer today from up north, Monterey. This is Ray. So this is the Cerveza Artisanal del Norte. This is a Mexican IPA. So I'm pretty stoked for it. Yeah. Nice, simple one.

Not a fancy. These guys don't mess around with their label. They just put a little. Just give me the words. Yeah. It has like the, it's got like a design sense. Like it's a ride in fantasy land and in Magic Kingdom. Like it definitely smacks like something that would be sold near Cinderella's castle.

I think these, this profile here is the mountains in New Orleans. It's probably the Monterey Mountain skyline or whatever you call it, right? So, yeah. All right. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. That's good stuff. I got a wacky looking one.

I've got this thing called a power juicer, which is kind of a wacky-looking one. Icarus brewing. So, I thought this is near about the course is that. Sounds fancy. Yeah, Lakewood, New Jersey, so not very far away. A little Jersey beer, you know. This was another set that I picked up

over the Christmas time shenanigans that was happening. So it's actually pretty delicious. It's definitely not like a wintry situation, but it's quite, quite juiced. I mean, a double-hopped Imperial IPA can be pretty hardy. It's hardy, but it's very, like, the juice is not,

they're not laying off the juice kind of situation here. Okay, it's a little fresh for the winter, is that what you're saying? Which is good. So, I'm into it. Excellent. All right, where are we starting? Because maybe we should start with the thing I said right before we went live,

which is, well, you've lived the entire circle of life of a space industry professional. You've done, I think, all of the cycles at this point from presumably working somewhere before Rokor to then co-founding Rokor and then it getting acquired and then going to work at other places and continue the cycle. So maybe you can give us a little like previously on Will rundown of a longer version of that storyline. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, you talked about the founding of a company. Rokor was a fairly small company. And, you know, I feel like we had really good timing.

We were, it was a time where it was good to build a small company. And it's a fairly, you know, there are a lot of folks out there starting small companies now. There's a lot of small startups doing really cool stuff. And it's a fairly approachable thing that we did, you know. We, over a period of 10 years, basically, we founded a company, developed some cool products. and then sold it to another company merged with Redwire. So, yeah, it was a, I've been through the whole, you know, I've seen the industry from all the different angles.

I've been at engineer, consultant, founded the company, sold the company, went public. And now I'm just doing business development at a rocket company. It's great. But yeah, kind of a little bit of the background is, you know, I had a mechanical engineering background and spent about 20 years in deployable structures and got pretty deep into architecting large deployable structures. So I started at a company that was kind of a materials company developing new composite materials for space structures.

While I was working there, I got a master's degree in the something related to composite materials then it sounds like you're trying to hide it it sounds like that's like some stealth shit to be honest something related you know non-misterious at all

didn't mean to be mysterious I just didn't want to get into you know geeky material stuff unless you want to I'm happy to go into it but you know I'm going to need a couple more arrays before we do that.

And then I was a, as an analyst, became a consultant. And that kind of really, honestly, being a consultant opened my eyes to a lot of things because you could come in and sit in all these different startups, large companies, as well, government entities, and get a feel for how they operate, work with teams. And that ended up giving me kind of a network. And then kind of the confidence to jump in with some other folks. and start a company. And we started Rope Corps in 2011 with the idea of doing deployable structures for the space industry.

It's kind of a, you know, 2011. There was a lot of kind of term oil at that time in the industry. I should say the industry was changing, you know, from being very much government-driven to being more commercially driven. So we kind of saw an opportunity there, and it really all started with, team. You know, Jim Collins is an author from the area who writes business books, and he liked to say first who, then what. And that's kind of what we ended up doing. We found a really cool group of folks, myself and Doug Campbell. A guy named Great Grubury was involved initially

and saw the opportunity to put together a really good team. built a really productive culture and kind of went from there. And really, what's interesting is we were all in, there were a bunch of us kind of in an incubation center, I'll call it. We just rented a commercial space in the front range and kind of invited cool people to come sit there and have an office. And out of that group came Rocore, but also a battery company called Solid Power, came out of that same group, Doe Campbell.

ended up kind of running that for a while. And another company called Tendag that does antennas now, pretty successful, deployable antenna company came out of that same building. So, yeah, kind of an interesting little incubation center we had going on there that turned into a bunch of successful companies.

Some of the unsuccessful ones as well. Some things that didn't work out. We're plenty of those. And yeah, we started record and grew it to about, what, 70, 80 people probably. By the time we got to 2020, which is when Redwire came along and acquired Rort. This, you know, much of the same team is still there in Longmont, doing really cool stuff. If you track Redwire, they've posted or published some stuff recently on supporting the link 16 communication architecture. It's part of the space development agency constellation.

They have, you know, 16 communication, secure communications for anything from handheld radios to helicopters that now relay through space. And it's a pretty awesome capability for the military. And, yeah, that Roe Corps group is who builds those impetus. So really proud of that and the stuff they're still doing. How did you pick deployable structures like back in the day? Why did that feel like a thing? Well, there's maybe two parts of this, which is, number one, it's a deployable systems and deployal structures sounds like such a niche thing, but also it sounds like everything

that a spacecraft does when it does anything sufficiently interesting. So it sounds like both very niche and very broad. So I would love like a primer on what was the purview of Rokor and how you decided that should be the purview that you focused on. It's a really good question. But, you know, if you think back to 2011 when we started, these really capable kind of SIPA class spacecraft, spacecraft, you know, I'll say in the 100 to 400 kilo range, didn't really exist.

There were definitely really, you know, really small satellites that could do things that a few sets. But the military, for example, wasn't using, you know, 250-kilogram satellites to do stuff. And there were some technologies that needed to be developed to enable that.

And one of them was deployables. You know, we needed, you couldn't go out and at the time, go out and buy a 6 kilowatt solar array for a washing machine-sized satellite. It just didn't exist. And similarly, you know, antennas that were kind of designed for that size of spacecraft didn't exist.

So we saw the opportunity to make those small satellites have kind of big satellite capabilities with the deployables. That's really what started it and why we went into deployables. That is a really interesting time period to decide that too, right? Like 2011, I mean, I always credit that time period as like why I got into this stuff because I was in college, in Florida from 2009 to 2011, which is just like this. the moment the industry changed from the space shuttle going away, SpaceX starting up, felt like that was the shift that happened in that time period.

So, yeah, it's like, I don't know if you could have chosen a better year to decide that, like, I'm going to stand up for the sub 400 kilogram spacecraft. Well, I mean, it's also like kind of, it was a good decision, but it's like, that's also pretty risky. Like, I can imagine, like, that could have gone in a very different direction and no one really knew. I remember it was hopeful, but no one really knew where that was going. right?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We were, you know, we bet on a lot of things, and that's one of the things we bet on. We had other things that weren't as successful. You know, we had some diversity in the kind of the products we were developing, but really we went all in on the deployables for, you know, kind of that class of spacecraft and there was some luck involved.

You know, we could have gone, we could have went all in on the QTAP platform, and let's make CubeSats, you know, really capable. And probably, you know, maybe that'll happen someday. But at this point, there aren't very many high-value cube sets going up. Gosh. Take that CubeSats. How do you feel about that, Jake, as a Marco defender? It was a pretty cool example.

Was that it, though? Was that the high watermark for CubeSets? Is Marco? I don't know I don't know I feel like I haven't thought about KubeSats since Marco honestly this is the first time

I'm realizing this Yeah Kind of it I mean planets got 8000 of them Inspires launches a bunch You know Yeah but is that Is that the issue though

Is it it's not high profile It's just out there getting Yeah they're just doing their thing How many KubSats are launching On every transporter mission And how many They're delivering value right Like that's a

Have you done a In-depth inventory of the last Transporter mission to like learn everything about each payload. Definitely not. Yeah. That's my thought. Yeah, it's a fair point.

There are, you know, we get a lot of capability from CubeSets these days. Yeah, they're, you know, made in volume. They serve a purpose like, you know, planet, you know, Earth observation. And, but, you know, they did it in such a way that they could build those things in high volume at a pretty low cost. It's very vertically integrated. So there wasn't something, there was an opportunity for a company like Ropeor to come in and give them a capability that they require to make that possible.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the kind of the funny thing about KubeSats is that they are, the whole win of a KubeSat is that it's like all these standardized interfaces. So you just kind of like buy the parts and you can kind of assemble whatever you want to do. And it's all the shape's the same. The way, you know, everything's kind of like, you know, figured out already. So all these like new constellations that have like volume advantages don't

need that flexibility, right? So it like makes more sense to just make a knotcubes that. Just make whatever exact form factor you need because you're going to make 5,000 of them. So it's all right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you were the first one to say SPAC and I'm actually curious about if we can get back into the spack craze because this is another thing that I haven't thought about for a couple of years because everyone stopped going public by way of spec. I mean, you know, what's the deal with SPACs, I guess? What was your experience of that era from the inside?

Well, I'll tell you my experience. I mean, I'm not an expert on SPACs, but I experienced one from the inside. And I can tell you my experience, which actually, interestingly, when we were acquired, by Redwire, they, I think we're already in the, I know they were already in the process of going through this back acquisition of becoming public. They just couldn't disclose that to us until we were part of the company. So I think we, you know, we became part of Redwire on a Thursday, I think it was. And then it was Monday, Tuesday of the next week. They said, hey, welcome to Redwire, you know, let's get acquainted. By the way, we're going public now.

So you know, they change between the part of Red Wire, but it's a week later and now we're going public. So it was, you know, fast moving, interesting time. But I think, you know, if we, for example, Red Wire would have gone public just directly without the SPAC mechanism. It would have taken a lot longer. We may have done it anyway. I think, you know, the important thing to point out is that we ended up at Red Wire on the New York Stock Exchange with Red Wire stocks. SPAC was just one of the mechanisms to get there. So has a bad reputation, I think because it doesn't filter out as many companies.

The whole process of becoming public filters out a lot of companies. You have to be, you have to have some discretionary budget. You've got to have some funds to invest. You've got to have, you know, very professional finance. seeing you've got to spend a lot of time and that filters out a lot of folks the SPAC mechanism does not filter out as many folks but at the end of the day it's just a mechanism and just because a company is a SPAC company doesn't mean they're not going to be successful I think that's the way I look at it so forgive forgive my web software nerd comment that that may only make sense to Jake

on this call but probably other listeners but turns out SPACs are like the PHP of going public like There's no bear of entry. You can just do it. And then that's why there's like a lot of people that hate it and a lot of people that like it. I mean, it is the other aspect was, you know, you're saying it didn't filter out as many people. It also happened to be at a time when there was a lot of companies that needed filtering out. Like there was a solid amount of those that were going through the process that most of the industry was like, I don't know about this. Like this is, I'm not seeing it on this one.

So that plus the lack of filter, I think, made it a bigger news cycle than it probably deserved to be. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. It's a really interesting thing because the what a spec is is a merger with a company that's basically already gone public as a shell. And it's basically a bunch of experts that are experts at going public and they build this shell and then they merge with a company that's ready to go public. and it just accelerates the process.

So at the end of the day, you just end up with your stocks in the New York Stock Exchange and the folks that buy stocks decide what to do. I think unfortunately these days, after having gone through that and all the folks that didn't do so well through the SPAC process, it kind of has a bad name. So for companies like Redwire that happen to do a SPAC, it doesn't help them. But at some point, they'll just be a company on the New York's, Stock exchange and people will forget they were, you know, they used the spec mechanism to get there. Hopefully.

We should do this quiz. We should do this quiz, Jake. Can you name all the companies that went public by way of spec? That's a big a fun quiz. Astra. Black sky, I think. Red wire. Black sky.

Momentus was trying. Virgin Galactic did. Virgin did. Momentus. Was Virgin orbit in the process? of doing it? I forget. I can't remember now. Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Planet? I forget if Planet was a spec. I can't remember if Planet did. I think it was. It must have been. It must have been. It must have been. There was that era. No one was doing the paperwork if they didn't need to at that time.

Yeah. And then the other aspect that we didn't talk about also, and this, this might be more, maybe more to the point is that your going public by way of spec didn't require that you had a, like, a deck that said all the satellites are going to be launched in the next five years, which all of the companies that went public by way of spec that we were feeling weird about were like showing the hockey stick chart of like Astra notably of like, we're going to do three launches next year and 300 the year after that. And it's like, okay, I don't know about maybe we should take chill pill in that one real quick. You kind of double spacked. You like spacked into

us back. Exactly. We had an 80-person company in Longmont and went public in nine months. A whirlwind. And then you were like, all right, well, that was fun. Maybe I should sell rocket engines to moonlanders and other things? What was the, how did this happen?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, at Rokor, I kind of ran the, engineering side for maybe the first half of it. Eventually I was in the CTO. We brought in, Chris Pearson as the CEO at Rocor. And eventually I moved over to the business development side. And other folks came in, you know, and kind of managed the engineering team. And then when we got acquired by Red Wire, that's the role I was in there. And, you know, It was interesting from the standpoint of, you know, being a part of setting expectations for the market and then trying to meet those expectations. And that was a roller coaster ride.

But yeah, having gone through all of that, weaving red wire, took a little bit of time off. And then my buddy, Chris Pearson, had moved on to Agile prior to me joining Agile. and I looked at it and I wasn't actually wasn't ready to go back like full in on a company or a responsibility to require you know 100% of my time plus every week and that's what agile is it's a rapidly growing fast-paced company but I saw a lot of similarities to you know what I loved at record which was you know, there's no big egos. It's just a super productive kind of culture and team that's making awesome stuff happen every day. And, you know, kind of being exposed to the space industry from the deployable side, and you kind of ask why we chose deployables. What's exciting, one of the things that's exciting to me now and what's changing in space now

is the need for spacecraft to just be more dynamic. You know, space force talks about maneuverability without regret. There's the space force just formed because space has become a contested environment. And so satellites aren't static, right? They move at thousands of miles per hour or whatever. But historically, they've just kind of sat there in their orbits. And I think between military needs, commercial needs, and, you know, what I hope is becoming, you know, even a more productive science community as well, we just need this, you know, our assets to be more dynamic. We need to move around more.

We need to be able to change orbits. We need to be able to do Mars sample return. We need to do more missions like that. we need to be able to avoid conjunctions and satellites, I think, just are going to become more dynamic. So I was interested in a company that's trying to solve that problem,

you know, solve the propulsion side of that problem. That makes sense. I can get down with that sort of like economic need, right? Because it's like if launch... So if launch is getting cheaper, like just straight up, it's just cheaper to put something in space. that means that you don't have to spend as much as your budget on the payload, right?

Because if mass is really constrained because cost is so constrained, then you want to just like every dollar to go towards the actual useful payload at the end of the line, right? Like whatever is actually doing the thing you want to do there. But if you take a little bit of pressure off that and it's not so expensive to put your thing, you know, your due dad in space, you can add a little extra capability to it, a little bit of different power or propulsion or navigation or whatever. extra sort of like infrastructural pieces to the satellite that could help it do its thing in different places or longer time periods or whatever, right?

That's kind of a pretty simple economic way to look at it, I guess. That's cool. I'm digging it. I'm picking up what you're putting down. Turns out. He likes rocket engines, this guy. This Mars nerd. Yeah.

Yeah. Think about all the missions we often talk about now that we just didn't talk about 10, 20 years ago. You know, there was always space domain of work. but now we're talking about satellites that change multiple orbits and like, you know, approach, you know, objects in space, whatever they are. If they're a conjunction risk, if they're, you know, an adversary spacecraft, who knows, we're building spacecraft that, like, change orbits multiple times to investigate objects. We're doing all kinds of things in lunar orbits, you know. We have a lot more hardware going into lunar orbit than we used to. And yeah, even like SpaceX, you know, they do maneuvers to reduce risk of conjunctions.

They do it with EP because they can right now. But I think as space becomes more crowded, we'll see the need for satellites to just be more dynamic. And, you know, as we take more advantage of it with the growing space economy, and we're just putting more hardware up there. We're going to want flexibility to change, you know, business models or adjust business models and get to different places. Yeah, and I just believe we can't afford to have the capability only to get to a very specific orbit and stay there.

I think we need a little more dynamic capability now. We had Lars and Chris Pearson on Lars Osborne. I'd say Lars, because he's first thing. and basis, Jake and I, but maybe not the people out there, on Miko, a couple of months back at this point. And I asked him a question that I'm curious to get your take on, too. I was talking about the fact that in the space industry, there are very few and almost none left,

suppliers that sell propulsion for launch vehicles and lower stages of spacecraft. But there's a lot more that sell propulsion to satellites or spacecraft or landers or whatever the case is. And it's a weird, like, it's a very strange, it's not strange if you're in the industry, but if you were to tell someone that is not familiar with space to explain that, like, there are very few third-party suppliers

of engines that go on the part where you're not yet in orbit, but there's a lot that sell it once you are in orbit. It's a weird thing to try to explain to somebody, and I'm curious what your take is on why that is the case these days, and if you feel like either one of those is, is going to change at any point in the future. Yeah, there's definitely some nuance there, right? When commercial organizations, you know,

when very commercially focused organizations weren't doing launchers like SpaceX, they weren't as concerned about vertical integration. And so they would have entities like Aerojet, Rocket Dine, develop engines for those launch vehicles. But now you've got the SpaceX example, and there are other commercial companies starting up to provide low-cost orbit, of course, and we're going to, we just saw Vulcan launch, which is really cool. But yeah, I think the way the new launch companies look at it is launch is kind of propulsion. The whole purpose is to get something from the ground to there.

So they tend to vertically integrate it, right? They kind of start with the propulsion and build out from there. Rather than start with the structure of a launch vehicle and then buy the propulsion from someone else. They kind of start at what they see as the core of it, which is the rocket engine and the propulsion and build out from there. That's just kind of how they do it. Part of it could be that there wasn't kind of a,

a new space, low cost or reasonable cost supplier of launcher engines, right? And if that exists, you know, if someone creates that, will there then be a need for it? And will there be launch companies

that take advantage? Maybe. Maybe it's just a chicken and egg thing. But that's kind of what I see when I go talk to the launch companies, you know, like ABL is a good example. You know,

they, propulsion is what they do. They started with propulsion they don't want someone else doing their engine in their case. It's just kind of, and it's, you know, it could be the environment they started, and there just wasn't any option. But that's kind of their culture there, and they're good at it. So that's how I see it.

And then, yeah, the space side is different, right? Their propulsion is a part of a satellite, but it's not as big of a part. as it is for a launch vehicle, right? I mean, it's somewhere between 5, 10, 15% of the cost of a satellite goes into the propulsion system, whereas I'm guessing it's much larger than that for a launch vehicle, right? So, you know, companies will specialize in the things they're good at, you know, which could be attitude control pointing very accurate or building large,

volumes of satellites quickly, whatever they do. They're not, it's not a obvious choice vertically and a great propulsion. If there's options out there, you know, good options out there at a reasonable cost. Yeah. I kind of, I mean, I think people still understate how much of the rocket is the engine. I mean, that's really, that's what the product is. So it's like, when you kind of think of it like, why would, you know, what does a rocket company go buy an engine?

Like the engine is the thing. The question is, do they go buy the tank? Right? That's really what it is, right? And it's always been like kind of, ULA always really confuses me because like from a harddoor perspective, like, what is it? It's some aluminum tanks, right? That's, I think, you know, ULA's value is often more their operations and their navigation

and their delivery, like all the service part of that because the engines aren't their IP, right? Like they don't really have any control over any of that. They just buy it. So, I mean, it's an interesting, like, the ULA scenario is kind of a weird rocket to me in that sense. It's just like they, I don't really know what the situation, like, it's weird to me. It's weird. Especially when you factor in them, like, buying solid rocket boosters and then upper stage engines too. Like, yeah, it's all the propulsion is not theirs, right?

They're just like, you know, what is their, what is their IP is kind of an interesting question? And they've never made any move towards that, which is also interesting. They've never had any intent of like, what if we hired a couple people that could do rocket engines? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, it's on. But, like, you know, if you think about Falcon, though, like, Falcon is very much, like, it's a bunch of Merlin engines with accompanying tanks and a lot of great software. Yeah, yeah.

Like, that's what the... One, and even to that effect, like, the physics problem is, like, how few tanks and how little tankage can we have so that we can have all the mass fraction of elements, everything else? How do we do more engines and fewer tanks? Yeah. If they could have launched in a little, it was just engines that didn't take any fuel, they would do it in a heartbeat. Like, they're... A boneless skin eater, if you will.

Yeah, the bone of skin eater. would be like instantly, they'd all be all about that. It's just funny that it's such a stark handoff of like, am I, the flow chart of how to decide what you need as a rocket engine is, am I in orbit yet? If yes, go buy it. If no, you got to build it. I don't know what you're doing.

It's kind of that as the whole flowchart. And it's interesting. How do you then approach when you're, you know, in your role, like, you don't have to go, you know, open all the books for us and tell us all the secrets. But if you want to just say this is part of your related to composites degree, that's okay, too. What is the approach on, like, when you start talking to somebody who wants to buy some engines from Agile, how does that process work? Are they looking for a certain aspect of performance?

Like, I don't really care how much thrust this engine has, but I need it to be able to do X, Y, and Z, or I really just need to get to this spot in space. You tell me what is the best offer you can give me or what's the best match. What is that process of figuring out what somebody's actually looking for? No, that's one good question. I will relate it to launchers. I will say launchers will have effectively small rocket engines upstream of the main engine. You know, they'll have things like pre-burners, they'll have gas generators.

Those things we do actually. So we provide that kind of hardware to launchers. launch companies because it's, you know, the physics of that are kind of more in line with the in-space propulsion that we do than a, you know, multi-stage big, like, you know, liquid propellant main engine, which is a whole different kind of, almost a different discipline in a way. So we actually do launch vehicles. We just don't do main engines. we do all the little components upstream through that.

Right. But yeah, you know, more of our business is satellites and kickstages and things like that. And yeah, the way the conversation, well, you know, part of our business is lunar landers. We work with Astrobotic and Ice Space. And those were some of the first, those were the first projects we won at Agile. before I got here. I've been at Agile a little over a year now. And yeah, back in 2019, I think is when we got the first Ice Space contract. And in that case, you know, the conversation was that we need a new capability that hasn't, you know, doesn't currently exist. It's not like

you can go buy off-the-shelf lunar landing engines. It's been done. We did it back in the Apollo era. We can kind of look at that as, you know, for examples, but we're doing a smaller lander and the engine just isn't out there. It doesn't exist. And the way Agile works is we've designed the company to be fast, essentially. I think that's one of the big needs in the space industry right now is, you know, just the volume of things we're doing and how quickly we're changing things and how quickly we're putting

up new capabilities. You got to be able to produce hardware volume, but you also have to develop new hardware or customize hardware pretty quickly. And so the way we set up Agile is the test capability is in-house, which is kind of unique. It is, you know, I don't know how familiar you guys are with vacuum testing for rocket engines, but it's a bit, it's a big hurdle to, be able to do that really well. And a predecessor to Agile was a test company that eventually turned into a propulsion products company. And so we had these tests sitting out there

that we had been using to test. Aeroget rocket engines, MoG engines, you know, everything you can think of and kind of built up that capability over time. And then we said, wow, if we can build an engine, and then just walk across the street and test it whenever we want, and we're in control of that asset, we can move really fast. And we can be more hardware-rich in our development.

We can develop things quickly. And then we kind of designed the manufacturing process around being fast, too. Like a lot of folks, we heavily leverage additive manufacturing for rocket engines, which just makes a lot of sense for rocket engines. But, you know, since we have that in-house and we have all the materials and powders and stock in-house, we can say we're going to design a new engine. You know, it takes however long to design it. It typically takes a day-ish to print it.

Very small park count. You assemble it. You're testing it. And we've literally had customers come in where they have. You know, we go from fresh sheet design to hot fire in something in weeks rather than months or years. So, yeah, when it comes to developing a new capability, there just aren't that many companies that can move that fast and get serious hardware on a test stand, hot firing stuff quickly demonstrating that it will work on orbit. So for things like lunar landers, that's where we come in.

There just aren't that many companies that can do that. And then more, you know, thinking almost chronologically as agile, you know, has matured, you know, has matured. We've been able to make a lot of sales in the satellite market after we kind of demonstrated the developments we did with the lunar landing engines. And there it is kind of all about speed again. That's kind of a need we're serving, serving, you know, for class A missions where there's a very long schedule associated with it. we work with those folks we've been into those projects

but it's a little bit harder of a sell than buying the traditional heritage engines even if the lead time is 24 months but for a company that's trying to put assets on orbit in a year or nine months or 18 months they can't wait 24 months to get their engines so that's

that's often where the conversation starts is just we can move really fast. And at this point, you know, we have about 10 engines that we've developed. So when customers come to us and they need a certain thrust level, they need a monopropropellant or bi-propellent and kind of know what they need based on the spacecraft they designed a lot of times we'll have a fit because just as time has gone by, we've developed pretty good catalogued catalog of products. And then the conversation becomes you know, then we start talking performance. And a lot of times it comes down to what's your ISP

because we just want to have our mission last as long as possible or we want to have as big a delta V as possible with the amount of propelling we can carry. Or we want to minimize the amount of propelum we're carrying so we can put maximum amount of payload. And that's all about ISP, right? It's kind of the main metric we talk about in the propulsion industry. And so that's kind of where it goes from there.

But, you know, there are a lot of different kinds of engines. There's the attitude control side where you want to have very small pulses as controlled and small as possible to finally point your spacecraft. And then there's your main engines where you want a lot of thrust or a longer burn. You just want to be very efficient. you know, very different kind of products there and kind of everything in between and then lunar landing is a whole different

you know that's a fun one. That's a whole thing, yeah. That's truly a whole thing. Yeah, remind us the conversation goes. Remind us the parts of it's Griffin that you're working on with astrobotic

but I forget which particular engines it's the attitude control ones or the main ones, I forget. Yeah, for Astrobotic, it's the attitude control engines for Griffin. So the vehicle has bi-propellant main engines, so it's convenient to have the active control engines also be bi-propellant. So they're relatively large 110-Newton bi-propelling engines. There's 12 of them on the vehicle, and that's what we're providing there. Big boys.

Big boys. Yeah. We're in big gratitude control. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a big mission. I was going to say, you know,

I don't want to like, you know, step on it too much, but they've definitely been doing a lot of attitude control lately. So it feels like a thing that they care about. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, dear. Jake. Yeah. I mean, it's been a big week for attitude control. That's all I'm saying.

It has been. big week for attitude control yeah uh for feed systems um you know just the the uh the upstream portion of the feed system and and yeah uh you know it uh i've enjoyed watching that and all the press that estrobics putting out is this is super cool um they've they've uh provided a lot of information and all the pictures and everything is just amazing. I don't know how you guys feel about that, but it seems like, you know, the whole community is learning a lot from it. Space is hard.

Those kinds of things happen. You can't blame them too much. And, yeah, just the way they handled is pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah. It's also funny, though, because it felt like a major change. The way that they were handling communications before launch was much, less open than post-launch. And you can talk that up to the combination of like clips and NASA and ULA and everything

was all tied together. They were playing scheduled chicken with Vulcan and there was a lot going on. And then once it launched, it was like, I guess we'll just tweet everything. Like we'll just tweet it all. We haven't determined if this thing and this picture is Earth yet. We think it is, but we'll let you know. Here it is anyway. They definitely just went full on.

This is what we got. Which, yeah. And then, you know, now. I mean, there'll be a press conference tomorrow where I'm sure we'll learn more about what was going on behind the scenes, but knowing that there was, most companies probably wouldn't take that approach. They'd be like, we don't really know what is going on with our spacecraft right now. We're trying to get a handle on it. Let's just not say anything until we know and we can write the whole story all at one go. And then we'd have like three tweets from Scott Tilley of like, I think something's going on with this thing.

Like, who knows what's happening? And we'd be able to like track it that way, but we wouldn't actually know. So it has been definitely a good test case in, like, how to approach this stuff. So I guess we'll see if any of the others take a similar approach. You know, being the first Clips mission is kind of interesting as well. Like, you're definitely, you're... Lots of eyes. Yeah, lots of eyes. And you don't really have a framework on how you should handle this, you know?

The first couple of human spaceflight missions that went up commercially, you know, Inspiration 4 got a bunch of flack about, like, you know, where's my live stream? and it's like, well, they're just like hanging out in a spaceship right now. Like they're probably sleeping or eating or something. They don't need to do the live stream the whole time. Like NASA did. So they had a rougher time with trailblazing how to communicate that stuff, whereas this felt like they were so open about it,

and they were doing the best they could with what information they were getting. So, you know, Will Intuit machines also take that approach. Who knows? Are we going to see cool picks of the agile engines next to the Crescent Earth when Griffin's on its way out? who knows I hope so yeah

you gotta get a camera angle you gotta like do next time you're out in Pittsburgh just be like so where's the camera where the cameras

gonna be out on this I'm like do the Canada arm thing yeah yeah selfie stick for those cameras yeah it's weird

our attitude control engines come with their camera built in it's a strange thing it's just for us to classify performance of our engine

I have a question about the future. So, I mean, if you're trying to think about what is the next deployable structures bet that you'd want to make, but, you know, with your agile engines, like, what are you thinking is going to change in the market for the next, you know, ahead, looking ahead 10 years?

And what are you trying to do to, like, get ahead of that and be part of that? Yeah, you know, we've been thinking about that a lot and it's, it's, there's so many problems out there to attack. It's stay focused. And, you know, kind of where we are now, honestly, is there is quite a bit of demand for spacecraft and for someone who can deliver propulsion systems on a reliable time frame. It's a reasonable time frame. But some of what we've seen is, okay, it's great you guys can deliver your engines in six or nine months, but the tanks are the first thing that go on the spacecraft,

and we're waiting, you know, 18 months for those. So, you know, can you guys do tanks? You're literally on that question. So that's just an example of broadening out a little bit and solving propulsion. You know, it made a lot of sense to start with the engines, the hard part. maybe the hardest part. There are a lot of other, you know, portions of a propulsion system that require a lot of experience and knowledge. And, you know, I don't want to, you know, not account for that.

But we started with the engines, which I think was the right call, but we need to solve the rest of the problem. So, you know, full systems, tanks is something we're investing in right now. We actually did make a sale of quite a few tanks recently. So very new product for us. And yeah, we want, you know, we want customers to say, wow, okay, now we can build our spacecraft faster because all the propulsion components, which are one of the first things we integrate

came in, you know, quickly, much more quickly than we could get them last year. So that's kind of our goal right now is to finish developing all the different engines that are in development and then the rest of the propulsion system that's necessary to really give these missions the full capability they need.

Propulsion as a service. Yeah, yeah somewhat. I mean, really, customers react to that really If it's, you know, a big prime, like a lockkey, they have probably a bigger propulsion staff than we do, maybe. So they tend to want to just buy components, but they very much appreciate the fact that we understand the whole system. And we have folks that can talk the whole system and wear whatever product they want to buy, you know, whether it's a tank or thruster or whatever it fits in. And then smaller companies, you know, really appreciate someone being able to come in and just spec out the propulsion system for them and customize it for their spacecraft. Or, you know, something we're looking at in the long run is, you know, thinking farther into the future, you know, the Space Force and others are, you know, really wanting that without regret.

regret, which part of that can be solved with refueling. And there's a bunch of companies out there working, refueling, doing a good job. I think we can help on kind of the propulsion development side of that, whether it's having a propulsion system that will accept refueling services and having all the tanks and feed system and pressurization system and everything in place that'll be reliably. refuelable. And then the other one is, you know, thinking about things like, okay, typically,

if you're running a monoproposthruster on orbit, you do eventually run out of propellant, but you also have catalyst in there that's consumable. So the thruster itself, you know, won't necessarily run forever if you just keep doing it. So how do you address that? And, you know, um, Do you replace those on orbit? How do you do that? Do you make the entire propulsion system modular so that you, instead of refueling it, you just replace the whole propulsion system?

That's a problem we're really interested in solving. It's really enabling, you know, for the Space Force and others, folks that have big geo assets up there and Marshall satellites would like to operate them longer as well. And then there's folks working and servicing side of having the space. spacecraft that'll do their RPO and come up and conduct the operations to do refueling. So addressing kind of the hardware side of that is really interesting. So yeah, those are some of the future things.

Yeah, and then there's there's you know, there's interesting work going on on new and different propellants, green propellants, you know, which really means, lower toxicity propellants. And we're interested in working with the Air Force and others on, you know, solving that whole supply chain problem of the propellants we use now that are super reliable and high performance are also toxic. You know, have the toxicity issue, which, you know, is at least perceived to kind of slow down the overall. ground operations of fuel in your vehicle or all that kind of stuff. It's harder to ship a fuel to vehicle. Can be done.

Has been done. But most folks don't, you know, load their spacecraft with fuel and then ship it to the launch site. It's normally very kind of remote cases. So, yeah, that, you know, kind of working through that whole supply chain issue. and just allowing us to get assets on all the way is interesting. That's lots. There was a lot of Colorado in that answer.

There was a lot of Space Force and presumably orbit fab. And then you guys, that's a lot. I'm feeling like this is mainly a takeover by the Colorado Tourism Board. So that's great. We're going to take over to the world. Colorado Chamber of Commerce. And clearly I got paid. I put in my top five states.

So, you know, definitely catching out on this one as well. We need to add the Instagram sponsor link at the bottom of this theater here. Hit us up, Colorado. Paid promotion ship. Yeah, hit us up. We only got beer sent to us one time, but we've gotten two tourism board sponsorsings. So it's a weird market for us to hit. It seems possible.

The test stand stuff that you were mentioning is, I feel like, low-key, the most interesting thing because of stories I've heard of the one test stand that got real backed up. And it was like pretty much there's one test stand that got real backed up and it delayed several missions, one of which might crash into Earth tomorrow. Like there's some storylines there within the industry that are things that are like really, really niche but really impactful when they happened. And, you know, because I think we all think of test stands, we think of SpaceX. in McGregor or Blue Origin and Van Horn or, you know, the, uh, the Stennis test stands.

Like, we think of big main engine test stands and we don't think of the other kinds, um, up until they're the problematic part of a mission, you know, like, all of a sudden, we all care about Plumbrook because like two spacecraft going to the ISS needed to use it at the same time. We're like, well, this is going to be really, the time that James Webb went into the one at, uh, was it Johnson Space Center where they're like super cold, uh, test facility was. I was like, I feel like test facilities are talked about never, and then they're like the highest priority thing that everyone's writing about one week, and then we all just ignore them again the next

week. So they're... The, um, the parachute stuff with some of the Marslanders went the same way, right? It was just like, all of a sudden, if we don't get this parachute test done, it's over. Yeah. And then there are also things that like, so if one mission finds an issue, and then they take a little longer on that test facility, that's going to delay the next three that we're waiting on that. And it's just, yeah, it's such a storyline that nobody cares about until it's all we care about. And that's an intriguing part of, you know, what I've talked to you about and Lars about, about how unique the test capabilities are. Like, that's definitely not a thing to miss.

Absolutely. You know, it's kind of interesting, having come from deployables now doing rocket engines, you can do tests on the ground right, but to deploy out this really delicate, you know, lightweight antenna in a one-chee environment, you're always introducing a bunch of errors to the test because you're hooking up all kinds of things to it, offload it.

They can't support its own weight on the gravity. And then you're trying to do your communications test in some kind of an echo chamber on an antenna that's meant to communicate from, you know, across thousands of miles. And it's really hard to get a good test on the ground. Whereas with rocket engines, you know, you put it on a vacuum test stand and fire it under the same scenario

you're going to fire it in the mission. If it can withstand that, it's not going to have an issue with five loads. You know, it's going through the most stress it's going to go through and the thermal loads and all those kinds of things, just operating it is where all those loads coming from. So, you know, you can get through, you know, you can burn down most of the risk with propulsion systems if you do it. And if the test exams are available, you know, by testing on the ground, it's kind of the way I think about it coming from the deployable to the program. But it doesn't always happen. I mean, there are companies out there that just don't have

the test capabilities is available. So they just can't build that into their program. They can't, you know, there are even folks that manufacture engines and ship them without, without acceptance testing them, which, you know, maybe in very high volumes isn't a bad choice. But at this stage, when we're delivering tens, you know, hundreds of engines, we're acceptance testing every single one. And what we'd love to do is, you know, do testing at a, kind of more propulsion system level

to test the full propulsion system of the tank as well as the full pressure radiation system and beat system put it all on a test stand and test it together rather than as individual on incident really I mean there's there's risk

and valid failures and all those kinds of things and if you can do the environmental testing where you soak it through the right environments you know get you know the right moisture and anything that's the propulsion system is going to be exposed to and then test the whole thing extensively.

You really can burn through a lot of the rest. Whereas with antennas, I used to say, we just need to fly it. Just get us up there. Just go. Tell that to the James Webb crew that was like, all right, well, we're going to deploy this and undeploy it 18 times, and we'll keep trying it and repacking it, and then it worked.

Everything went great. Yeah. Again, we only care about testing for the five minutes that everyone else cares about testing, and then we all forget about it. Well, it's been awesome hanging out. I don't know. I don't have anything else, Jake. Do we miss anything?

No. No, I think we're good. We just got to go to Colorado is, I think, the thing we missed. Just got to go to Colorado. It's the takeaway. Absolutely. You're invited at any time. I mean, Jake was the one that missed out last time.

So, this is a big. Man, Space Symposium, they picked a tough week this year. They picked the same week as the eclipse. Like, ain't nobody going there. It's really bad planning. They should have done any research in that and maybe shifted their week this year. Yeah. Move it.

At least move into the center line. Like, let's move this shit to Austin or something, you know? No, you can't move it out of Colorado. We can't talk about that on this show. Yeah, sorry, sponsors. You just ruined our sponsors. ship. Oh, man.

Well, all right. I guess I should quit before. Yeah. Fired. Thanks, guys. Get talking about. Thank you, Will. We'll be back next week.

What do we got next week? John Connoffay. John Connoffey. This new situation he's got going on over at Integrate. Hot takes. I think the last time you and I both talked to him,

we were hanging out at that roof on that roof. The famous IAC roof. IAC roof with Robert Lightfoot. Yeah. Yeah. And we were both too nervous to talk to him because we just, like, made a bunch of fun of them.

They're several weeks before that show. Yeah. So, that'll be a good time. So that's next week. Yeah. But until then, cool. Thanks for hanging. Thanks, everybody.

Bye. Ciao.