Off-Nominal - 177 - Sudafed and Rockstars (with Matt Gialich)

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Matt Gialich, Founder and CEO of AstroForge, to talk about asteroid mining. Yep, we’re doing the asteroid mining show.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 177 - Sudafed and Rockstars (with Matt Gialich) - YouTubeAstroForgeAgainst all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway - Ars TechnicaWhy is AstroForge mining asteroids? - YouTubeFollow MattMatthew Gialich (@MattGialich) / XMatthew Gialich | 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. Jake, it is nothing but a slow news week, huh? Geez, we're just getting hit, like, just day after day this week on stuff, man. I feel like it's going to be a chaotic year. I don't know what's the right time frame. We'll see. It's been fun, though. Yeah, it's been fun.

Several years. It's going to be a bit. Are you there of you guys in San Francisco? Did you hear about the tsunami? That was supposedly going to come? I didn't show up. Yeah. It didn't show up.

up. Oh, okay. It was late. Another disappointment. Another disappointing earthquake. Right? Like, Matt, now I forget how to pronounce your Yugoslavia name that's been changed. It's Gaulich. Gawlitch. Gawlitch. Gawlitch. Gawlitch. Close enough. Matt Gawlitch. CEO, founder of Astroforge. We, have we talked about asteroid mining in this show before, Jake? I guess we have one time, right? I think we've like skirted around the edges of it in a way that was like, what is this? So I'm pretty excited to talk to someone who's like get their hands dirty with asteroid mining because it's like, it seems like black magic to me. And I'm not sure where we're at with it. So I told Jake this right before you hopped on, Matt. But the number one reason that we're

having you on the show right now is because right after Eric Berger finished an interview with you for the article he wrote a couple months ago, he texted me and said, you've got to have Matt on the show. Like, just get it scheduled. So I was like, all right, no, no, no, questions asked, no other answers needed, I will make that happen. So welcome, welcome on the show today. Yeah, thanks for having me on guys. It's probably, if you're in services to go, it's probably early. So I don't know if it's too early for a drink out your way. Did you bring any beverage's? I'm going to tell you the real ways that CEOs and founders drink. It's all about this. This is an energy drink, rock star, right? Just about, what is this, 160 milligrams of caffeine?

This is my third one of the day. And then I've been just, just, just a lot. Just to really increase the stimulants, I've been sick as shit. But you don't get to stop working. So I've also taken a whole bunch of Sudafed. So, you know, we'll see how this turns out, guys. We'll mix at 1 p.m. That's, and there was almost a tsunami. So that was, you just keep going.

We're just south of L.A. We're about 15 minutes south of L.A. and Seal Beach. So no tsunami warnings here, thankfully. It would have been more of the problem because that has, you have less topography. helping you out right on the beach there as you might if you're up in the San Francisco area. For sure. And I do feel like the tsunami warnings, I've gotten them a couple times on my cell phones like, cool. I'll believe it when one shows up. Tsunami truth is Matt.

Yeah, the exact right attitude you want for any kind of emergency alert. You know what? Let me go down the beach. And I'll look for it. I'm probably going to die. So like, why worry about it, right? With that attitude you are. Yeah. especially when I ignore it. I'm just staying on the beach.

Like, whatever. I'll go down there and see for myself. Genius level intelligence over here, guys. Yeah. While on three energy drinks and Sudafet. Jake, what happened? There's no way you can live up to that. No, there's not.

Eric was already right, by the way, five, six minutes into this show. I love talking with Eric because Eric, you know, we got on the call. He's like, I talked to you guys two years ago. I didn't think you'd still exist. And I was like, I'm not sure we would either, but we're fucking here. So let's see what happens. I love Eric. He's awesome.

Space is like such a great kind of community of people and reporters. What is that? A little shardin. I'm drinking some Argentinian chardonnay today. Yeah, a little lino blanco, right? I'm going to make a risotto with it later, so I figure I may as well open the bottle early. I also have a drink that's related to a dinner I made recently. Look at that.

We've got a little theme going. I usually, I don't ever really drink this. There's just one of them left in my fridge. I'm drinking a Guinness because I made beef and Guinness stew, like earlier in the week, and I had one more Guinness than I needed. I'm going to be honest, I'm not really into Guinness. Like, just generally. It's just kind of, it doesn't really do a lot for me.

Please don't think you're not going to drink it out of a can like that, though. No, no, I have a, I have a glass from Kate May brewing in honor of my fellow New Jersey and by birth, Eagles fan, and future head. of NASA. All three things that we have in common, Jared Isaacman. Calling the shot. Yeah, good to go. You wish you had a billionaire one in common with him as well, but I get you. Not a requirement for the rest of my things.

So I did like how there was somebody tweeting about there's obviously going to be corruption with this guy because he was really into sports betting from space. Somebody's trying to latch onto that storyline. when I talked to him a month ago, he was like, I honestly didn't mean for that to be a story. I just forgot the season would start when we were up there. So I told my brother to bet on the Eagles. And he was like, this is not meant to be a story.

And now it's like this illicit gambler breaking the laws of geo location. I don't think we've had a pick by Trump that has been so well respected as Jared. And I'm psyched. I think everybody was a little bit surprised by it. I thought there was a couple other top candidates that were going to get selected. And I couldn't be more excited. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen.

But like the fact that we just have someone that's a little bit younger, that's just an innately passionate about spaceflight. I think that's the number one thing to me. This guy isn't like some career politician or government employee. He just loves spaceflight. I think he's going to truly do what he thinks is best going forward. And that's that excites me. We'll see what happens.

The pot will be stirred. It sure will. For sure. And it needs to be. Let's be honest about it. it needs to be, right? Like, SLS is $42 billion, and what did we do? Not a lot.

My main take, we're going to talk a lot more about this over the next several weeks, obviously, but my main take going in was like, no matter who was going to be the administrator, no matter which party won the election, there was going to be major change in these four years because there had to be, like all the budgets were hitting at the same time. Something was going to get canceled or delayed or shifted or shaken up by nature. And so, yeah, if it's, I mean, Jared, the way that he speaks about the issues that we are faced with as a space industry, I've always admired and thought that he's got a really good take on it. I mean, there's a reason he's doing a private space program and facilitating development of things that he's interested in hasn't yet got to the asteroid mining, which maybe you're hoping is like Polaris 4 or 5 or, yeah, where's that on the Polaris roadmap? We'll get it on there. We'll get it on there.

I'm curious where to start with the asteroid mining of it all. And probably the thing I find most interesting with the industry is that there are very few examples in the space world of a thing that will so obviously at some point in the future be a viable industry and yet it hasn't latched into place at this moment. Like some point between now and forever, making use of space rocks is a thing. and there's been a couple of attempts that have tried and failed for various reasons. Have you, when you started out here, did you like look back and try to understand why each of those failed and flamed out in different ways and what you could do different? Or is there something like altogether different that you're approaching with Astroforge?

No, look, I think at the end of the day, guys, you know, why are we taking a stab now when nobody else? You got to kind of be an idiot. That's the honest truth. Like, at space is this whole industry as a whole, it's a lot of people that are very highly, educated, have worked their way up in companies and are willing to start kind of safe bet companies. And you see this, whether it's another rocket company, whether it's another Earth Observation Company, whether it's a satellite bus company. I have great friends that run all these types of companies. And I all think they're great people. But it's also like boring

as shit. I don't want to go to low earth orbit anymore. Like I want to push a little bit farther. I mean, the magic of SpaceX in 2002 is that everybody thought Elon was a complete moron. Like, okay, dude, only governments have ever done this before. You're going to go try to build an orbital launch vehicle. Good luck. Like, you know, nobody even really, to be fair, like clearly took this guy seriously. I actually don't think it was till like in the government levels until 2016-17 that people even started to like flip that switch. This was not an overnight thing.

And when you look at that and you take that kind of same group of people that I think in 2002 set out to change the world, where would they go now in the space industry? You think people that want to go change the world in space industry get motivated by Earth observation? Like, no. You have to push farther. And I think that's really actually where we started with the company. It actually wasn't even about asteroid mining when me and Jose first started talking about it was, if we can get to deep space, the fuck can we do? I had all these stupid ideas, by the way. These were not all great.

One of my ideas was to go fly by planets and sell ads. So imagine, like, you do a Jupiter fly by, and it's like Coca-Cola and Pepsi at the bottom or whatever, right? That was like a legit idea I wrote down. And Jose was like, this is a complete, this is, I'm leaving. And I'm like, okay, fair enough. So we, and then we really started to think about like, if we could. And by the way, there was some major changes that have happened recently that kind of allow deep space access to happen. This isn't all just that it came out of nowhere.

Like we talk about space launch getting cheaper. That's all great. But the real thing that happened is the NASA eclipse program. And now for the first time, like you had these commercial missions to the moon. What does that mean for going to deep space? About 95% of the energy to get deep space is contained by getting us to the moon. So we can now buy kind of ride share slots on rockets to get us to the moon. We could only provide 5% more of the power to get us to deep space.

Now you can get to deep space real cheap, right? And that's where this all started. Astrid mining was just one of the light items on the list. That's all it was. And when it came down to it, when we actually looked at the other side, okay, cool, we want to go to deep space. We want to operate in this new environment. We think there's an unlock to go do this. How do you make fucking money?

Because at the end of the day, the only way you're going to get investors is to actually start a business, right? You can't have a business that's just like on hopes and dreams. Those are called nonprofit. We didn't want to make one of those. We went out and we really looked at it. We said, like, precious metals are a problem. We know about PGMs on asteroids. This can make a lot of sense, barring one kind of technical innovation you have to do to make that actually happen.

And that is we had to develop a way to turn an asteroid into the platinum group metals. That was what we knew we were going to have to develop in-house. That was the one piece of this that had never been done. done before and we couldn't buy off the shelf. Other than that, every single piece of asteroid mining has been done before. Like, to be clear, the Japanese NASA have gone out to asteroids,

landed on them, grabbed samples, brought it back to Earth. We understand these physics very, very well. That's a huge that was asteroid mining, just not the kind that we're thinking of with the dollars. It was just... It wasn't the kind you hear about in Hollywood, but to be clear, we're not doing the Hollywood shit either. I mean, that's

a little bit out of our price range. Yeah, yeah. I guess what so was there I'm curious about the math on that right so it's like the basic concept is not difficult this is like there are things you know like there's there's precious metals inside these rocks but like you have to get to a place where it's like okay well you know what what percentage of these rocks is that metal therefore how much can you get out of a single one because like the economics of this change dramatically if you have to go to multiple, you know, places to find it, I guess, right?

Maybe not that dramatically, but it changes. And then it's like, how much do you have to bring back for the whole thing to be worth it? And it's like, that's kind of really curious is maybe where I would want to start. It's just like the nuts of the business plan is going to be like not what the variables are. It's like get to space, get the rock, bring it back, sell it. Like that is very clear. But it's like the X and the Y and A and the B, like the values of those things changing as they go through this equation can throw it from one end of the spectrum, which is like complete

disaster bankruptcy to like the richest person we've ever known in our entire life. There's a big range, big swing in there that I'm really kind of curious about how you got there. How do you navigate that? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. And I'll just be completely open with you guys. Again, I will say this from the upfront, I think a lot of spaces like this very closed community where we don't like to talk about. We don't like to give you all the assumptions. We don't like to be completely transparent. And I hope even. of Astroforge completely fails as a company, like that's one thing we bring to this industry going forward. So here's exactly how we thought about it. Number one is when it came to coming back and

doing reentry, like the limiting factor here is down mass, right? How much, how big can your heat shield be to reenter the atmosphere and bring back? And we've got some pretty good examples of how to do this. There's been about 16 deep space return missions and history, right, that we've done. Apollo 11 is a great analogy for this, right? Apollo 11, about 1,000 kilograms came back, give or take. We know the heat shield sizing, a whole bunch of NASA data on it, the speed that was there. There was a whole bunch of testing done. And so we right away said, cool, we got to be around that thousand kilogram down mass range. So what does that mean you can bring back? Well, in a lot of test data, what we actually say here is to give you a sense, our spacecraft going up are 200 kilograms.

We want to bring back 1,000 kilograms of material. Down mass is going to be right around 1,140 kilograms. That's what our down mass will be coming back in the atmosphere. Again, because a lot of that studying's already been done, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We don't have to make some new heat shield. So just to contain size here, what we're talking about, these aren't going to be spacecraft that only fit in starship and, you know, or 10 million tons. Like, these are very, very small spacecraft. A thousand kilograms of the platinum group metals at the expected concentrations, and we get these, by the way, from all the meteorites that hit the Earth. Like these hit the Earth all the time. We can go study them.

We expect that to be worth right around $60 million in today's money, right? That's what the metals trade for on the spot market. So essentially what you've got to figure out is if you can get to deep space mine and asteroid and come back for less than $60 million. that's where we start, right? And I think if you were to look at this in a standard NASA mission, you'd be like, nope, you're probably two orders of magnitude off, right? Like if you're up a clip or mission costs fucking $5 billion. There's a lot of argument on how it costs $5 billion.

I don't think all of that was actually in spacecraft development, but regardless cost $5 billion. And so first thing we really looked at, again, was launch. There's the NASA eclipse programs. We can buy ride share slots. There's a lot of new launchers. The cost of launch, especially for high energy, can be much, much cheaper than it is if you were just to go to SpaceX,

even just to go to SpaceX today. and buy a Falcon 9 or a Falcon Heavy, let alone go to like a ULA and try to buy an Atlas 5 or, you know, or whatever the Vulcan or whatever it's called now. We can get that price dramatically lower. And if we can get the launch price dramatically lower, you're always going to have a satellite parity to launch price, right? Like if you buy a billion dollar launch and you launch a 500 grand satellite on that, that's kind of idiotic. But if you buy a $5 million launch, you can now take the risk and build a $5 million satellite. And that's exactly how we thought about it. So cost is the biggest driver here.

The first thing we actually did, me and Jose spent a couple days doing this, we literally just went and looked at every deep space mission that had launched and why they failed. Like, why do these things actually fail? Not why does NASA tell you they fail? Not why do people assume they fail? Why do they actually fail? The number one reason spacecraft fail is software just because programmers made mistakes. And like if you really start to go look at this and you buy down risk in those ways, you can actually get to a point where these spacecraft are much, much cheaper. To be clear, the launch we have come up.

coming up in about two months. Now, this will not be a mining mission as a whole. This is going to be the first commercial deep space mission, but it's doing a flyby. It's going to take an image. That mission with launch and total cost us less than $7 million. Fingers crossed it makes it. But those are the price plans we're talking about in two days' dollar

and they're already built, right? This is like fake fishes, can we get there? That thing takes off in about two and a half months now. Wow. I do hope your openness catches on because God damn it's refreshing. If I read one more Goddiam press release that's like, we signed a launch contract with this company. We're not telling you any details about it. Nothing.

No money, no weights, no masses, no dates, nothing, nothing. And you're like, no, it's just this mission was $7 million. That's, yeah. I'm pretty sure I'll get sued at some point because I'm probably violating something. But whatever. We'll see how that goes. Yeah. Whatever.

We might get a Wikipedia page out of it if you do. So that'll be good. That'll be worth it. Yeah. We'll see what happened. So I hope that answers that question. That's how we thought about it from the beginning. and that's kind of the bounding of the prices

and how we had to make assumptions here of what we could go do. And it really sets the standard when you're building these vehicles, when you're building every piece of technology on here, when people come to you and say, like, oh, we can solve this problem for $10 million. It's like, that's great,

but that doesn't actually solve the problem. That destroys the business model. So nope, take more risk, vertically integrate, figure it out. It cuts out a lot. It paints your path to the mission much clearer in that way. Yeah.

What's really motivating about the approach here is that, like, I've always loved the fact that what is the greatest legacy of the ISS program was this side benefit of the greatest commercial launch company that's ever existed, because they made use of a commercial cargo program to bootstrap everything we're witnessing today. Clips is under the radar, and you went even below that radar to, like, oh, that's just cheap ride shares out towards the moon. You're like two radar levels down in the inception ranking there, and I love that because I've, you know, I've read that when you're, that was your point.

but I've never, I don't know if I've talked to anyone else that solve that as the opportunity of like, oh, these other big budget missions, which are, you know, $70 million task quarters or whatever, are going to also, you know, have excess performance on there that we can make use of. Yeah, it was one, like very small thing. When we saw the contract for Intuitive Machines, like NASA publishes these astrobotic, right? I think the Astrobotic land is about 1,900 kilograms. That's going to fly to Vulcan, though. The Intuitive Machines ones about 1,200 kilograms.

Falcon can take at least 3,000 kilograms to TLI. And the nice thing here, and TLI, by the way, trans lunar injection, that's essentially to the moon. The nice thing here is that it's kind of cool because nobody else is kind of stupid enough to go to deep space. So, like, who else is going to buy your slots? Like, maybe you'll sell one to JPL.

Maybe like a moon orbiter, like a comms orbiter or something someday, but, yeah, there's not a lot. And there is. Even on ours, there's lunar trailblazers on our flight, right, which is a really cool lunar mission. Like, don't get wrong, I still love these fucking scientific missions. I think they're awesome. And like, that's still what I dream about as a kid.

Right? That's where this whole company comes from, by the way, is me and Jose met interviewing at JPL, right? Like to go work on Europa Clipper. That is still like the inherent passion that we have behind this. I just don't want to spend 30 years building a single mission that like goes with one sensor on it. Like, let's go try to change this industry for the better. Yeah. So I take it the ad rates you were calculating.

We're not very motivating. Yeah. ads were less than the platinum. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, the ads didn't work out too well. It really just was a terrible business model as a whole. I always laugh about it because it was like the stupidest one on there. Jose looked.

I think that's the point when Jose looked at me and he's like, do I even want to continue talking to this dude? Like, are you this dumb? I'm like, yeah, kind of, bro, but like, cheer me out. In fairness, you can still do the ads and top of the other missions. You can do them in tandem. NASCAR and double the value here. So, I may not,

in the computer machines did. I mean, they had Columbia logos all over their lander. They were doing it. I think we're going to announce a clothing sponsor soon because I've really pushed for this. I also hit up Red Bull because I was like, dude, your thing is like Red Bull gives me fucking wings. What if it gave you wings to a damn asteroid? Like, how legit would that be to paint this thing like a Formula One car and send it out there? There might be a lot of thermal problems with painting it like a Formula One car, right?

And I get it. And the thermal team is like, please don't. But they haven't maybe returned all my emails yet. So I'm going to keep trying. If anybody from Reds Bowles listening, I'm ready to talk. Yeah. We got a huge market in the in the energy drink area. Yeah, exactly.

Or Rockmore, I guess. Rockstar if you wanted to talk to. No grand loyalty at all. Red Bull, call me while I drink your competitor. No wonder they haven't emailed you back. Shit, I'm kind of mad at this marketing stuff. I got to work on that. Shocker, you end up in the ad industry.

Right. I have more economics questions because the 60 million sounds. Sounds good. Is that, but there's, there's, there aren't just like blocks of like pure platinum floating out there, right? So is it, is 60 million like accounting for like some sort of like, I don't know, is it platinum ore like mixed in with the rock or is there some sort of extraction that you're also going to be doing in space before you bring it home?

Oh, absolutely. What I would call this here is more like enriching. It's really hard in the mining world because it's really complicated. I won't dive in all the details, right? But essentially what we do is we want to go out to what are called metal asteroids or M-type asteroids. They've been on for a long time to have really high grades of platinum group metals on them. There's a whole theory that like all the PGM minds we have on Earth are actually ancient

M-type asteroid impacts. Regardless of all that, who cares? It's still like at the best. Is this a Joe Rogan episode? I feel like we just ended up on the Joe Rogan podcast. What just happened? You know, I won't go that deep. But, uh, it's entirely possible.

We'll see where this ends up. How many more Sudafed and Rock stars are they take? We might get to Alien shortly. But I do have a great story about aliens. But let's make an assumption here that these things are somewhere around. Okay, so really quick sidebar, I did a live radio show. And it was like, I didn't know how I got on this live radio show. And they allowed call-ins.

And so fucking Jose went on there and called in and asked me, like, as a fake person, what I would do if we found aliens on the asteroid? Oh, my God. And I responded with, I would. shoot them with lasers and destroy them, which I think is reasonable, right? Okay. So go back to the- They're trying to steal your asteroid.

Yeah. Hell yeah. You end. They're trying to pirate your asteroid. Fuck out my asteroid aliens. What we look at here is let's make an assumption that these asteroids can be like 1% platinum group metals. It really doesn't matter how we think about this.

It means we have a certain amount of material, primarily nickel and iron that we need to remove from the asteroid. So essentially what our refinery does and the easiest way to explain it is we remove material from the asteroid and we reject iron and nickel and we keep. everything else. There's a really key thing here that a lot of the assumptions we build into going into the spacecraft are is that iron and nickel are magnetic, platinum group metals are not. And with that allows us to do things like land on the asteroid. We land on it with magnetic feet. We actually just essentially stick to the asteroid with magnets. And then we remove the material, separate it out,

and keep the PGMs, and then send it back to Earth. So what we end up with this kind of like, this fine grain sand of platinum group metals with a couple other things in there that aren't that important. And we test this a lot in the office, by the way. The reason I can give you like direct numbers here is because we literally use meteorite samples that we buy and we put them in a refinery and we like turn them into PGM dust, right? Like that is how we test out our refinery. We end up with anywhere from like 95 to 97% platinum group metals. Now we are limited by down mass right. So a thousand, as we look at this, thousand kilograms of that is going to be the PGMs and whatever else is in there. Hmm. 95, 97. That's pretty good.

Like for in-space refining. I will take it. But that's really not the question that is the hard one, right? Like we can build really good refineries that can give us 99.999%. In fact, the first mission we sent up to low Earth orbit, that small refinery that we sent would get you about four nines of platinum group metals. It was extremely good at refining. The problem was throughput. That thing would take, by the way, that one would have taken, I think it was 52 years to refine the asteroid to that rate.

Like, cool story. If a mission takes me 52 years, we're all dead. Yeah. It's like, it doesn't matter. The platinum's just going to get more valuable over time anyway. So I see. I guess it's ready to work. By the time it comes back, it's worth $6 million just due to inflation. The real challenge here is like for the amount of power that we can put on a spacecraft,

how fast can we refine the asteroid? That's what it really comes down to, right? And so we try to put some assumptions in there is we don't want to spend more than three months on the asteroid. Again, if you're going to build a spacecraft for single digit millions, like this thing ain't going to be able to live in space for 30 years. We limit all our missions to two years or under. We have some pretty big guard rails here that we try to build everything and fit it into. So the refinery is taking a lot of work.

We've made a lot of progress on it. We filed a couple of patents at this point on it. And we're in a pretty good place on it, right? But we still got to go packetize it and send it to space. That is what will happen in a future mission for us, really on our first mining mission. So what's the power solution then? Is it just big solar arrays or do you think it's something different? It has to be big solar rays.

There's nothing else that's far enough along that we can really trust that's going to give us, right? With big solar arrays, especially some of these thin film solar rays that we have coming out now, we can get about three kilowatts of solar on one of these asteroids when we're out there as kind of an upper balance. That's what we're building to now on the spacecraft. We actually have the solar panels down on the shop floor. That's kind of cool looking. But that's about the most you're going to get, right? I would fucking love if there was a nuclear generator I could put on one of these.

One of these small nuclear companies, please let me know when you're ready so I can fly one because that sounds amazing. Nothing's far enough along where I can really trust it. And, you know, everything else is going to be too low power output for us to really take seriously. on this type of mission. Is that, just from a power perspective, like, if it's three kilowatts, like, you'd have to keep your kind of like continuous draw at a certain level that you maintain it for 24 hours, right?

Because if you have to charge something up and then stop and then charge it up and then stop, like, you know, and go back and forth, that's not ideal for your time, right? So is that, like, is that tricky for keeping your, like your draw, like your amperage low? All of these factor into margins that we put into building the refineries. So where we put the power level of the refinery that we're going to put, which is about 2,000 watts and how we think about it.

There's a lot that goes into the batteries on board, how you think about the asteroids are orbiting the sun and they're also spinning where we land on them, how we go in here. We model the shit out of this. And me trying to explain it in short order is not very useful. We do a lot of stimulation here to try to figure out what the hell we're doing. And the reality is I think this is what makes the company magical. I don't know if we're right, but we're going to go fucking try.

And like, for me, if we make it to an asteroid with a refinery, we sit there and we only refine half of it and I come back, like, that's a great day. I still mind a fucking asteroid and brought it back to Earth. Like, we can work on optimizing that as we go forward. We got to prove to the world that we can even do this, right? And like, we can get to asteroid for this toss and we can make that happen. And that's why everybody right now is focused on mission two, getting us out to the asteroid and showing people like a little commercial company in Seal Beach can,

actually do what only governments have done before. Yeah, the day that someone like you brings something back from space and sells it is like that's going to be a historical like pivot point that we'll look back on. Like, you know, we've seen like inklings of that, but just going out there and grabbing something that just goes into the market like any other whatever. Like just it's just platinum. And then someone who needs platinum buys it, like that's a, that's a day. Sheets is going to be on TV all day that day.

100% of his day is on TV. Him and Jim Kramer are just going to be like... Talking platinum futures and all that kind of stuff. Live stream is the first day. It's going to be you handing like one grain to somebody. And yeah, it's going to be actually... I think I'm going to auction it like the golden. Yeah, Rhode Bill CEO, right?

We got to like make something special. I keep telling people like I want to make... These aren't famous anymore, but like one of the Paul Wall Grills. You know what I mean? And just get my teeth in pure platinum. I want to auction it, though. So I think we're just going to do a live auction of the platinum when it comes back and see how much we can get for it.

Yeah, you're going to be our most valuable. Yeah, for sure. That'll be our most of the book. Make something out of it that is like really uncomfortable for someone in the government to talk about. Like if you made like a platinum like butt plug or something, you know, that like, yeah, the congressperson couldn't go up and be like, you know. Don't put it fast. I mean, that's a great idea.

I could just imagine that. Platinum alien butt plug like. Like, fuck. And done. Great idea. Yeah. That's what we're doing. I'm going to let Jose know.

He's going to just, Jose might not work here tomorrow after I tell him this. Oh. Yeah. Well, I have questions about scouting asteroids. I have two primary, I have three questions. One is, number one, do you, are you just like using data that has been collected by NASA and others of near-Earth asteroids? Is that the primary database you're working on?

or is there any additional scouting that you guys have to tackle? There is additional scouting we have to tackle for sure. Now, we start off with all these. There's three main databases we use that we start off with. And we go out and we do a lot of trajectory planning. We do a lot of first order trajectories and say like, these asteroids need to fit our criteria windows. And those criteria are things like,

can we go mine it, bring it back in under two years? Is it reachable by our current delta V? Is it within range for solar panels? Right? Like we can't be super close to the sun or super far from the sun. Is it spinning? We have like this laundry list of criteria. It has to check the boxes off.

And then you'll get this list of asteroids, right? And like in our office, we have this list of about, I think right now it's 47 asteroids that meet all these criteria. That's all great. Then what we have to go do is twofold. Number one, we have to, in a lot of cases, go update ephemorous. These things have not been, you know, it's not like we get observations on these every month. They have started to gone. The air bars on them are pretty large.

So like, let's go make sure they're still. real, they still exist, we can find them again, all this kind of stuff. And then it becomes down to what telescopes are available with what kind of spectral data can we get off them to give us better likelihood that they're M-type. We have a couple different ways that we go about this and do it, right? There's a lot of ways to understand M-type asteroids based on density, based on spectral data as we go through. But keep in mind, we're going to really, really small objects in the sky. These are small asteroids. I'm not going after 100,000 kilometer-wide asteroids. These are all going to be under a kilometer, which means their magnitude is extremely low in the night sky,

which means only very specific telescopes can pick them up and give us data. And if it's cloudy that day, we're fucked, right? And so a lot of this is going to be, like I tell the team, give us the best chance you have that we are going to get to an M-type. Am I going to launch this thing and know 100% sure we're going to an M-type? Absolutely not. I think I'd be totally lying to you guys if I said that. Part of the magic of the company again is like, we're willing to roll the dice and say,

we got some strong evidence to support it. Let's go see what it is. and we may show up and it's a rock. But even if we show up and it's a rock, like, we still showed up. I love it. I mean, that is exactly my second question because every asteroid mission

in the last couple of years has gotten to the asteroid and some weird shit has happened. Like, oh, we didn't expect it to be that kind of pile of rocks or, oh, we didn't expect our spacecraft to go right through this thing. Like, they've all reacted in strange ways

when poked. So is that, like, you're going to attach to this thing with magnets, which is one of the, level of crazy and then you're going to try to gather material. Like, can you explain the gathering process? Is that determined yet?

Of like, once you're attached. Well, for mission number two, we're just doing the, yeah, yeah, I know, but you're working on the other ones. Come on. Of course, of course, right? You told me this stuff. Come on. What we do is pretty simple here, right?

We remove material from the asteroid. We do that with a combination of lasers right now. So we have some videos. I can send them to you guys, too. Like, essentially, I hate to say this because it makes it sound sci-fi. And like, I really don't think we're a sci-fi company, but we use space lasers. You know, so I got to have some space lasers. We remove material from the asteroid.

That material essentially will flow up. And you'll see this distribution of it flow up. And using magnets, we can control where it goes. And that's exactly how we do it, right? We use magnets to steer out the stuff we don't want outside of the spacecraft. And we keep the stuff we do one and we store it right behind the heat shield. It actually using VanderWall forces will stick to an upper plate. That's exactly what we do.

And so we end up with kind of this very weakly held together sticking substance behind the metal plate or behind the heat shield, I should say, that we then send back to Earth. That's crazier than I would have ever imagined. Yeah, it sounds it. You know, when you actually see this thing in action, it's a very simple machine. And that's what's important, right?

Like, I can't, I can't, you look at mining operations on Earth, and these are billion dollars in infrastructure costs. They're very complex. You have a lot of mechanical drills and things like this. You just can't do that when you're 10 million miles away. Like, if we had a mechanical drill, it would be a non-starter,

especially for the amount of material. we need to remove, which is quite a bit of material, right? This isn't a small amount that we have to mine. Like, we have to be producing quite a bit. So you got to think about it in a very simple way that can just work long term. Yeah, and a drill is sort of constrained to something that's pretty solid, right? Like you get to some of these smaller asteroids that are, well, I mean, just look at what happened with Benu and Ryugu, right?

Like, they were really less rock and more like amalgamated. chunky powder stuff all hanging out together in the same location, right? Like you can't really drill into that. Like you would just kind of like fall through it. Right. So I guess you need to have some a more, a more robust, like a more adaptable process that can like regardless of what the composition of the, the asteroid is, you're able to procure something from it, right?

That's why we look at spin rate. We want to make sure the asteroid is actually spinning fast enough so we know it is cohesive. So we know it is not a rubble pile because if we show up to a Benu, the reality is, I have no fucking idea what to do with it. How do we stick to a pile of dust in space? Like, yeah, yeah. It's a cool scientific thing. Don't get me wrong.

It'll be some cool, some beautiful images sent back, but like, that's not a viable asteroid for me to go mine. Is that shape? Like Ben, you had that, you know, very like spinning top shape. Is that sort of like how you determine that? Most of the way we determine spin right now is through albedo measurements, right? Sun inclination, light, bouncing off the asteroid and coming back, and we'll see these nice curves that we can infer something along the lines of single.

laxas spinners, how fast they're spinning, trying to get orbital period out of them. And this all fits with an air bars, right? But essentially, we can determine if the thing is spinning or not. Can you de-spin it? So this is one of those questions, like, can we de-spin it and change its orbit? Yes. Can we do it in a way that's noticeable or is actually going to make a difference? Not really.

Like, these things, I mean, even if you look at an asteroid that's like 500 meters in diameter, that's so much fucking mass, especially if you assume it's 90% iron. Like, holy shit, it is so much. And we're sitting there with a little 200-kilogram vehicle. Yeah. Yeah, really, I mean, that's what we think these M-types are, right? Is a chunk of an inner core that was broken off. And, like, the fuck are you going to do with that?

So, like, technically, yes. Realistically, like, it's like eight digits after the decimal. About as you can spend the Earth by, like, running really hard. It's like, yeah, when you jump on the Earth, you technically change it a little bit. Not enough for anybody to notice, right? Same idea. All right, my final of the trio of asteroid scouting questions is, who do you have to ask the first time you're going to go collect?

to this material and bring it back. Do you have to check in with anybody? Have we figured that out yet? What's the regulation look like? How are you prepared for the onslaught of articles of like this thieving capitalist is destroying the space rocks and bringing them home for his own enrichment? I already get those articles and they're awesome. Like I love hit pieces.

I send him to my mom. Like I had one article said like Matt Gulletch, the founder and CEO of Astrofor, just going to destroy the planet and he doesn't give a shit. And I was like, this is amazing. Right? I'm going to send this on. The reality is with this is like, yeah, absolutely. We got to work with the State Department.

We got to work with the U.S. government. Like, we're very tied in with, I mean, even for our license, we just got with the FCC, like FCC, NASA, State Department, all got to be aligned of what we're doing and how we go forward. We have the 2015 Space Act. I think it gets pretty clear regulation that says commercial companies can mine asteroids and bring them back to be sold. Like, this isn't really a fair debate for me. Of course, you're going to have people that whenever you have a business model that will fundamentally shake the planet to its core. If successful, you're going to have people that cry foul about it,

right? There's some people that say, like, well, no, you have to do this for the humanity of the planet. Where the fuck is the humanity of the planet when I'm raising my series B? Like, if that's all true, cool, then you can all invest in the company. If not, shut up, right? Like, it's not, that's kind of how I think about this. Like, you don't get to reap the rewards without taking the risk. Let's be honest, that's why America's so great. That's why we have all the trillion-dollar companies. Why? Because we take the risk, because we're willing to put ourselves forward and do that. So there's going to be a lot of people that start to bring up a lot of ideas on what's going on there. I welcome those conversations.

But let's be honest, I got to earn those conversations. We haven't earned that yet. We got to get to the asteroid of mine and bring it back. And then I'll go to the UN and see what happens. But until then, let's go see if it's possible. Yeah, I guess because, yeah, this is one of those areas where, like, laws or regulations are pretty scarce. Like, there's not a lot written down about what you can and can't do when you get to an asteroid. So I guess as long as you're getting your launch license and your communications license, right, your FCC, that's the two you'd really need.

And then after that, it's sort of a no man's land, right? Yeah, and I think for us, guys, like, look, we're acting in best faith. We really think this is a way to solve some of the biggest problems that face the planet when it comes to mining. Like, I think we all know this. We're running out of resources. I don't care how you look at it or what timeline you think it's on or whatever, especially on the precious metal side. We are clearly running out of resources. This is going to have to be done.

The question you got to ask with Astrophoreg is, are we too early? That's really it. It's not, is it going to happen? It's, are we too early? And so maybe we're the ones that has to change some of that regulation, but it has to change at some point in time and it has to be acceptable by all countries at some point in time. And I just hope we're the ones that win, right? I hope we start one of the largest companies ever start in history.

I mean, this is clearly a play on like complete and utter dominance of all precious metals worldwide. Yeah. I mean, that's why I started there at the outset. was like this is so obviously an industry that will exist in humanity. It is we are, yeah, we have special rocks on Earth, but we don't have infinite special rocks on Earth. We need the other special rocks. They exist.

They are, they exist. They exist out there. We will make use of special rocks. I, the, there will be pushback on this, but like, that's, I don't know. I, I'm like the, I'm probably the guy on this podcast that would push back the most at like 100%. Probably. You absolutely are.

A big company. Some big capital of company doing. some extractive mining process. Like I'm the guy with the, I'm chained to the tree in front of the, you know, I'm that guy. But like this one seems to me like so obvious. It's like, okay, we have, you know, we need this stuff. Like platinum, other precious metals like this. They enable us to do an incredible amount of things in our day or day lives.

We need this stuff. Like, so why wouldn't I want to take this like dirty extractive like process and put it as far away from people and environments as we can get. Like, it seems like such a, like, a win, win, win. Like, it's like everyone wins from this. I'm really curious to see what those hit pieces end up looking like, because it's like, I don't know what kind of leg they have to say. Same as all the other ones, right? Like, there's a class of these that all always exist and always will exist. But like, there's no, there's no, animals that you're going to endanger. There's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, like, there's no, like, there's no, like, there's no, like,

like, I can project my, you know, like, there's, I think that's, you're more on it there. I think if I'm projecting my brain, however many years Matt wants to save forward, it's like, I think it's a wealth inequality hit piece. Like this company is able to, now this doesn't track with where your company's starting when we're trying to do this for cheap as possible, but like this company is able to go out and get these rocks and that will make them richer. They're already rich and they're getting richer by way of these rocks that I cannot access. That's the thing that exists out of all the platinum market.

Right. Yeah, yeah. As everybody can tell, this is like the most thieving, uh, out to get you barren that you've ever experienced. I think I can give the world my word that if I become the world's first trillionaire, I will be dead within the first two years. So all that money will be redistributed. It'll be a great two fucking years.

John McAfee. Oh, yeah, for sure. 100%. Like, no doubt. 100%. But it looks real here. I think that the problem is when it comes to people's perception of this is like, nobody understands the tradeoffs.

We don't like when I say platinum group metals People are like I've heard of platinum and jewelry But like the fuck is this I don't know what a ridium is I don't give a shit You don't realize like it's in all your electronics It's in the way we stop pollution in your car from these from you know is This in your catalytic converter like the every aspect of our lives touches the platinum group metals And the way we do it right now is we either dig gigantic open pit mines or we dig super deep in the earth I mean the numbers here are staggering like over 2% of global emissions are caused just by mining platinum group metals

that's it. And like we have a solution that can completely remove this from the earth. And you're always going to have the person that says, well, rockets pollute. Well, yeah, no shit. But you can also just do some basic math and realize like it's a fraction of what a diesel generator running in South Africa for 10 years straight pollutes, right? Like, yeah, even that argument doesn't stand. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've done the math, right? Like, we can go look at this and like your orders of magnitude and savings in almost every way, shape, or form. I think, again, it really comes down to like this, this touch and feel thing. The average person in their house has no idea what the platinum group metals are and hasn't heard of any of them. And that's kind of the battle that will always be

faced with. I like to say if we were going after gold, this would be a lot easier problem because people understand gold, I think, just more inherently. But there's no golden asteroid we've found, and I have no evidence to support one. Yeah. Well, and there's, I mean, if you want to get into like the real nitty-gritty geopolitics of it too, like a big, a big mover and shaker in the, you know, rare earth metals and precious metals is China. And like, so you have a country that is not democratic, that is not, you know, espousing free principles, freedom principles. And they're mostly going to like Africa to do it. Like they're pulling all these out of these giant open pit mines like you said in Africa. So like they're extracting resources. They're polluting the environment. They're, you know,

using cheap local labor forces that are not reaping the benefits of it. And then they're sending all the wealth back to a country that's not going to use it in a democratic way. So it's like, Again, I say win, win, win, win. It's like win, win, win, win. You know, like, there's like so many winners to like doing it the different ways. In almost every way. And the other thing we've asked all the time is like,

well, there's, I just don't believe that going to space can be cheaper than mining in on Earth. Because we have this notion that like Earth mines are really easy to do. Platon group metal ore is extremely deep at this point in time. I mean, there's a whole push in the mining history to say like, how the fuck do you mine more than 2,000 meters on the ground? Like the heat is so intense, how do you do it? So like, you know, as we go through this,

I think what people don't. don't really realize is we really can't mind below 2,000 meters. Not cost effectively. You can do it in very small batches, but not cost effectively. So, like, we're kind of trapped in the crust of the earth. And every once in a while, I'll see a new startup or a company announce, like, oh, we just found the largest deposit of rare earth metals. There are 15,000 meters underneath the earth surface.

And I'm like, we might as well have not even fucking found them. Who cares, right? I can tell you, there's a lot of platinum in the core of the earth, too. But other than that movie in 99, like, I don't know how to get there. So what are you going to do, right? Jake's for a movie, right? Amazing movie, right? Amazing movie. Best movie in the world. So it really comes down to like this economics problem that I think it's really hard to convey accurately to people that aren't in the mining industry about unit economics of mining, marginal costs on mining PGMs and what that can look like if you were to just turn that whole industry on its head and say it's actually really good ore sources. They're just that direction instead of that direction. How do we go think about those? Yeah.

We had a, I think it was like JJ through in the chat, the age old question of what happens if you bring back a lot of platinum and prices of platinum change on Earth and how do you deal with that and what happens then? I'm sure it's a thing you've answered 8,000 times. I just look at it's a commodity business. Yeah, like I look at the Wikipedia right now and it says that world production is like, I'm guessing like 200,000 kilograms a year. So like you can make a difference.

If you're like if you brought 10 spacecraft a year back, like that's a you're getting in the 510% range right of what that is. So I'll give you guys a whole bunch of numbers here that may or may not make any sense. About $60 billion of PGMs were transacted through London last year, which is the main exchange. That we go through. The reality though is about most PGMs are not sold what we'll call. They're sold over the counter. They're sold direct.

So a refinery goes and sells it directly to like an Apple or a Tesla going through. And that number is make it whatever you. you want. We know about some of these contracts, but we don't, I can't like actually go figure that out of high level, but it's measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars right as we go out there. We're bringing back $60 million. This is literally less than, I mean, literally less than like 0.1% of the whole market. So the reality is if you look at elasticity of commodities, usually it's between 10 to 15%. We're not even going to be a drop in the bucket. Essentially, it's like if you wouldn't have found this much gold in your backyard, like you're not changing the

fucking price of gold. You just got some gold. Congrats, right? Good for you. There will become a time when we're sending hundreds of missions a year and we go to this full scale, which I don't even want to talk about it. I don't even think about it right now. They're like, yeah, we start to fuck up the market. I'm just going to go higher that De Beers Diamond CEO and we'll solve it with that guy. I'll become the chairman of the board and he can

figure out the economics that I don't like care about. You start doing different stuff with the metals at that point, right? Like oil is a thing now, but that used to be not a thing. If we're going to keep adding wins to this, it's like yeah, the market crashes and your iPhone gets cheaper, guys, it's wins. Everyone's happy about that.

Or we come up with just a new way to live. I mean, I gave this analogy a million times before, but like, fucking Napoleon ate off aluminum silverware because that was the most baller shit you could have in the world, right? Like, I got aluminum pork. And now I'm like, dude, I just ate this sandwich. It kind of sucks. I'm going to wrap it aluminum and throw it to my fridge. Like, you don't even give a shit about aluminum anymore.

And wouldn't aluminum enable? Like a spacecraft, I'm sorry, an aircraft wouldn't fly without it being made out of aluminum. Like, it enabled our way of life. Right. There's a ton of known advantages of platinum group metals. I mean, the only known way to make green. hydrogen is through a platinum catalyst right now, right? And that is really the limiting factor on hydrogen vehicles. It's them saying, like, well, it costs so much fucking money to make hydrogen.

What's the point? I think you can go into a completely different way of life as you go forward with that. And look, whether or not I become the Rio Tinto and the richest guy in the world, or we revolutionize metals and we start a whole new world, like, I'm kind of cool with either of those outcomes. It sounds better than whatever the fuck else I was doing working at bird. Or, yeah, do you want to talk about anything before that? Of my particularly interest? Maybe. What?

Any of the Virgin companies? You were at both, right? I was at, so I got hired by Virgin Galactic. And then I got there day one and they were like, you're not going to work on the people carrier. You're going to go work on the rocket. I was like, okay, cool. I don't know what that means, but sure, I'll show up.

And we, like, worked above this little store. And it was above like Patagonia or some shit in Pasadena. It was like 30 people, right, working on what we'd become launch for one. I'm not going to answer any question. Like, that was such a cool, fucking. an engineering project. They're like, hey, dude, we're going to build a liquid rocket. We're going to strap it to a 747 and we're going to launch this bitch to space. And I'm like, this sounds amazing. And they're like did the business model. You're like, this sounds like

Pegasus 2 and that was a terrible business model. And I think that's what it became. But for all the engineers there, especially that core group of engineers at the beginning, like it was so much fucking fun. Right. Like you have to figure out these super hard problems that like nobody's ever thought of. And it's funny. It turns out that like it's a lot easier to build a rocket. it when you just put it on the ground and point it up, than to strap it to a fucking aircraft and try to take off with it. That's a really bad way to do it.

Who would have thought? To equate your past and your future, how do you now on the other side of the table, how do you keep track of whether what you're working on has made that jump where the engineers you're hiring in at the lower levels are like, this is a really fun technical problem, but what the hell is this business doing?

How do you keep track of like where you're at on that? spectrum. So it's it's actually really easy right now because the company's small. And the reality is if our company gets big, like I may lose track of this, but what do I do now? I just literally tell the whole company that we are a business and here's the fucking business model. Like everybody here is very well informed on what our production vehicle needs to cost, how it needs to get there, what our game plan is to get in there and thinking about it. And engineers are going to engineer. And it's very important for me to go talk to all them and say like, you know, I was talking the structures team and I'm like, well, hey, if we had another five kilograms on our mission,

number three, we can make sure it's going to be super strong and it's going to have all this margin for vibe test. And I was like, great. But if it weighs 205 kilograms, we can't fucking fly it. So might as well just add 10 more tons because who gives a shit. It's going to sit on my shop floor. Like, this is not a solvable problem, right? Like, you cannot, you are limited to this amount of mass.

You have to work within it. And it's, it's just constantly reminding people that I like to say my job as a CEO now is just to walk around and remind people what they're trying to build and don't let them get carried away. And you know, what I tell every engineer before they start here is like, if we get to launch and you're not scared that you fucked it up, you went too slow. And that's how we do this. Everybody here is like, is this going to work?

And I don't know, but we're going to go try to find out, right? Like, that's the kind of game we're playing. You have to be able to take extreme amount of risk here to try to be successful. Was there a moment in the run of Virgin orbit that that, that was it always that way when you started out? Like, you always had a sense of like, I don't know if this whole launch thing's going to work out. Or was there a moment in time when that flipped and it no longer seemed like it had

it in it. Yeah, you know, when we first started a virgin, the cost of the rocket was going to be much, much cheaper. We were going to be a single-string rocket. We had like all these philosophies that you went into it with, right? We'd be one-fault tolerant to crew safety. We'd be single-string to mission success, blah, blah, blah, as you go through. And then what happened is like, people got scared. That's the honest truth. As the company grew, you saw people be like, well, there's people on this airplane. I don't want to kill them. And like, that's a great thought to have. But like, it's my same analogy to astronauts. Like, if you're a fucking astronaut, and you're a fucking astronaut, and you don't expect to die, we probably went too slow. Like, you got to live a little, right? Like,

you're an astronaut. I don't expect to die when I get on a fucking airplane. That's a commercial program. You're an astronaut. Like, you have to be able to live on the edge. And it's the same thing for test pilots, right? You have to be able to live on the edge and go through. And people are inately just uncomfortable with that, which I totally understand. But that is a big problem. Why? As soon as you go like, well, we want to add more safety for the crew, then the rocket becomes heavier than it can carry less mass to orbit, then it becomes this and that, and you just kind of snowball into this, this non-viable product. And really what it was, it was just death by a thousand cuts. Yeah. That's the space story right there, the space engineering story. It's, it's cool

that you have, I mean, you saw, you were there for a long time. So you saw like the life cycle of that, which I think is really, you know, the problem is not the same that you're working on now, but having witnessed that life cycle of a company, I think is really good and valuable for you now in the position that you're in. So that's cool. It's actually not good different. It's just different, it's just different things that do it. I'm going to give you an example here. It's like we, we have these, so we bought some boards that support our solar panels. Not super important, but what they had was 10 ports for what are called RTDs or thermal sensors to be put on them. And so the thermal team goes and puts 20 more thermal couples on the vehicle. And we go into

TVAC testing and all of a sudden we have 20 additional sensors so they can get a better model. Well, they don't work. They cause us all these problems. And I go like, hold on. What the fuck? Why did we add 20 more sensors to this? We want a better thermal model. For what?

We're flying this thing one time. We don't need to have this solid thermal model as we go through. But every single one of those is a new wiring harness, another connector we have to buy, another sensor we have to buy, another piece of software we have to write. Like I sat there and laid it all out for the team is how much that actually costs us to just think we got free thermal data? Not at all. In fact, it made us fail an entire TVAC test and we had to go redo it. So I said, rip all that shit off the fucking spacecraft and let me know when you're going to add anything. Right? And like, you just have to sit there and continuously audit the system and make sure that everybody is thinking aligned because at the end of the day, it is just human nature to want to make your part of the system work. Yeah. That's the engineering challenge, right?

Especially with space stuff, you get the rocket equation is at the root of every one of these mass decisions. And so it's like exponential cost of failure, right? Like literally exponential cost of failure. It is. We're right on the like marginal line of being successful, right? Like, oh, that's what the problem is with all spacecraft. It's like, I mean, this is like a company like K2 is what they're saying. It's like, well, Starship alleviates that we can build differently.

And maybe that'll be right. Maybe that'll be right. I have no idea. But it's really cool to be able to release yourself from that constraint. I'm not on Starship. I'm on Falcon. I have that constraint. And it's a big constraint for it.

Like we bought, we bought X amount of mass on a spacecraft on a rocket. That's it. Your spacecraft has to fit in it. And everything that you do extra doesn't. And so you just have to constantly walk around and remind people of that. And it's a lot. I mean, but there's no other way to do it. All right.

Tell us the roadmap. You're on a flight in two months on the IM2 launch, I think. You can be there. Well, I am two. We're on the launch at brer-r-r-r-r-r-r. Because they're probably like, br-br-r-vat the launch date. But what's beyond that one? Or what is that going to do?

What is it beyond that? This is live, right? Yep. But is it recorded too? Yep. It's part of the internet, baby. Well, fuck. You're out there.

The launch date is going to be. I think they already announced. Yeah, I think they already announced. Look, it's just, it's the fucking 27th. I don't know what they're saying. It's not going to be any earlier than the 27th. Who knows what will happen? February 27 is when we leave the Earth.

And that's when we will send out mission number two. Mission number three, we're on IM3. That's going to be nine to 12 months later. Like, let's just be real about it. I have no idea what they're saying the date is, but it's going to be somewhere in that range. later. We're building the Spacecrack actively now. Mission number four, we are still actively talking with a few customers, although we

do have, we have bought some missions on a, I guess they haven't released it to the press yet, so I won't say anything, but it's a new rocket company. You can probably guess which one. We bought quite a few missions from them, and I really hope they're successful because that will be a game changer for us. Look at that. And then it's, so it's, it's fly by in imaging, then it's attaching to, the asteroid. Mission number three is landing. So we're doing our magnetic landing on that mission. We'll go there. We have two scientific

instruments. So we're flying right now we're flying what is called a gamma ray spectrometer. So we will essentially fly behind the asteroid for about a month and collect gamma rays through it to get a better overall picture. That will only actually be able to detect nickel. We won't be able to detect platinum group metals but we have a really good correlation between nickels

and meteorites. Then we will land and we will use a sensor. Right now it's kind of a trade between Rahman spectrometry. I can't even say this word, Jesus. It's too hard. It's so hard, man. I've missed it. Spectros.

Whatever. Look, the fucking ramen thing that will give us some answer of what's in the thing. Or XRF, right? Those are the two sensors that we're debating with right now that we fly to get a direct sample on it to see exactly what it's going to be. And then mission number four and beyond, we'll just mine the shit out of it. Like, there's nothing else that we're just going to start mining the hell out of that asteroid, if it's correct.

that's fast it's fast you got to be fast like I don't want to be a company for a decade I want to figure out if we can do this shit in the next couple years or not and like I tell all our investors

we're either going to give you an answer or not but we're not going to be here forever you know kind of fumbling along like so many space companies don't take risk and they sit there forever and they've been around I mean let's not talk about the one that rhymes with blue origin it's been 20 what

24 fucking years and you guys still haven't made it to an orbital launch. Like, Jesus Christ, what are you doing? I don't even understand. How do you go that slow? Like, I think they finally got their shit together, but like, what? I can't understand that. And like, I don't, if this isn't going to work and maybe I miss something, right, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a total, maybe I'm more of an idiot than I even think.

And it's completely stupid and it won't work. I want to figure that out in the next couple of years. I don't want to be 50 years old when I figure out this is a complete dut. Like, let's drive to an answer as fast as possible and take as much risk to go do that. So new Glenn is not the rocket you are buying a launch from it. Look, Blue Origin actually have some amazing people, and I really hope they would sell me new Glenn slots. I've been trying, and I'm going to continue trying. Like, what do I love?

I don't care who you are, as long as you can get me to a high trajectory orbit. It doesn't really matter to me. I think the only people we can't launch with is probably the Russians or the Chinese. I don't know. Maybe we can do the world. Do we still hate Russia or no? I don't know where we're at on that politically. I think at this point, it's not even, doesn't even matter.

They're just not good at space. So I would just recommend staying away from them. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Neither one of those countries are going to facilitate American dominance and space resource extraction either. Yeah, probably right. Probably right. So we're trying to stick with the U.S. companies.

And look, there's a lot of great rocket companies out there. We're talking with all of them to get us out there. But let's be honest about it. There's a thing called Falcon 9, and it's clearly dominant in the industry. Yeah. There you got it. Matt, this was so refreshing and absolutely wonderful. And Eric was right.

That's probably the title of this episode was just Eric Berger was right once again. Not the reasons that people think. Oh, I can't wait to get. I hope somebody writes some shit articles on me for this one. That's always my dream. Please send them to if you get him. Yeah, people quoting our dumb show. So that's what we want out of this.

So you delivered on that aspect. So it's great. Thanks for having that, guys. Jake, week we're doing a very dangerous thing at this time of our timeline where we are pre-recording a show because I am traveling next week. So Tim Fernholes will be hanging out with us talking about administrator Isaacman and what else were we going to talk about? All the surrounding chaos. Yeah, SOS.

Yeah, there's been some SLS news this week. So it's it's going to be a topical show, which is a fun one to risk doing ahead of time, especially in a, you know, this is. This administration is going to be one that moves quickly and breaks things, right? Yeah, yeah. We'll see if the news withstands the test of time of six days. More of anastroforge than a blue origin. So, yeah, very strong chance this show just comes out next Monday rather than next Thursday. Stay tuned.

After that, I will mention in advance, we are two weeks away from the off nominees, Jake. Off nominees. It's going to be good. Matt, every year we crown the winner of. the wackiest, craziest space story, something that went comedically wrong in the space industry, this is a good year. This is a great year for it. It's a good year.

Yeah. So, get some drinks for that. And there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, fitting into an hour, maybe a challenge. We may, we may, we need to have a conversation about that. So hard. Yeah, it's a good point, actually. I want to do a two hour run.

Oh, God. It's been a lot. All right, y'all. Yeah. We will, uh, talk to you next week. Thanks again, Matt. Thank you. Have a good one, guys.

Hi, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.