Off-Nominal - 241 - Maybe the Denver Airport (with Andrew Rush)

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Andrew Rush, Co-founder and CEO of Star Catcher, to talk about building a power grid in space, their upcoming in-space demonstration, their big fundraising round announced this week, and where they go from here. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 241 - Maybe the Denver Airport (with Andrew Rush) - YouTube Star Catcher Star Catcher | Star Catcher raises $65 million to build the first power grid in space Star Catcher raises $65 million for space power grid - SpaceNews T+281: Star Catcher (with Andrew Rush, President & CEO) - Main Engine Cut Off Follow Andrew Andrew Rush (@RushSpace) / X Follow Off-Nominal Subscribe to the show! - Off-Nominal Support the show, join the Discord Off-Nominal (@offnom) / Twitter Off-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Jake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Main Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘 Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, hello. Happy Thursday, Jake. How's it going, buddy? It's a great day. It's a great day. It's your birthday. Happy birthday.

It's my birthday, yes. That's my birthday. I was like, why is it a great day? Oh, yeah. It's your birthday. Have you ever had a birthday on the show? I mean, it must have. It's been at least one cycle.

Nine years since we had this. So I assume, where there was like a weird leap year in there, So I don't know, maybe not, but maybe, I'm sure we have. Probably. We can look it up. That's not why we're here. We're here with Andrew Rush, who's making his off-nominal debut. Been on Miko a couple of times, but never off-nominal, right? That's right.

I mean, I'm here because it's Jake's birthday. Right, obviously. It's nice that you have to go. I understand. Yeah, it makes sense. I'm glad you remembered because I didn't, so that's good. Yeah, I almost forgot entirely, but. Yeah.

It's good. It's going to be a great thing. This is a fun one, Jake. Andrew's got some crazy shit going on, man. This is a... It sounds like it. Yeah. And it's been two years since we talked, and things are different in the how much power

do you need in space conversation in a way that makes you seem the most prescient man in space. So I'm pumped. Talk about that. That's very kind. It's very kind. It definitely has changed. It's good to be back to you guys. That's new.

It's a new time. Jake, did you bring a meat or anything? thing? What's your birthday? No, I found something. I found something topical. You're ready for this? I think I've had this before, actually, but it seemed correct for the show here. Is this topical?

For an electric taste sensation. What the hell? Where did you find that? At the new grocery store. That has to be Mexico only item. Probably. I mean, it's quava, so it's pretty... Delicious, though. It's a very Mexican fruit, right? Delicious.

I don't have that. Andrew, did you bring anything fun for Jake's birthday? I did. I did. I have a, let's see, I can get a shot. That is a tequila old-fashioned in a light-up star catcher tumbler. Wow. Love it.

Does it only light up when it gets power beam to it from something else? Is it like a demonstration glass? Dog-thruiting. Yeah, yeah, we really believe in dog-fruiting at, at Starcatcher, so we all run off of the sun in a wrong way. That's an awesome. That's an awesome item. I've got a tonewood freshy, which is not topical at all, but it is delicious.

Freshy. Freshie. What is a freshie? That's the name of the beer. It's an American pale ale. It is delicious. This is a New Jersey beer. This is the brewery that is, we talked on the show with Casey Dyer about,

my local representative in Congress, Andy Kim, and he, his local jersey offices right next door to Tonewood. So, we have to get him on the show and go do it at Tonewood. That should be fun.

I'll figure that out. He's a good guy. He lives in this town that I live in. So, the fact that I haven't seen him yet is annoying. He was funny with, you know what he's really funny with? Do you guys remember the New Jerseyans drone

fiasco, like all the New Jerseyans freaking out about drones. Yeah, yeah. There was an early video where he was like, I'm seeing him. I'm seeing him out here. And then he like drove, I forget, he went to like some airport and had somebody explained to him what he was seeing and was like, he was early on getting fooled by the drone thing. And then early on the like, actually, this is just airplanes.

That was crazy. That was an unbelievable like month of my life. I hated every second of that month. That was terrible. No one had ever looked up in your town before and then they discovered, you know, yeah, airplanes. Like they were just airplanes. The videos were just airplanes. I don't understand.

It was crazy. It was totally nuts. So when the shuttle is still flying, so where I live in Jacksonville, you know, we're obviously on the ocean. And when the shuttle was still flying, I forget what social media platform it was at the time. people like spread this rumor that there was going to be like an alien spaceship that was going to show up like the night of some shuttle launch. And so all these people like I went to see a shuttle launch. All these people like on the beach to see a shuttle launch. And all these people were all they're like looking for the alien.

It was a night launch. And it was just this, you know, amazing arc of flame through the sky that you can see from the beach. And all the people are like, oh my gosh, aliens. I was like, no, that's just, it's just a rocket. That's that's a American dynamism. It's just a regular space. I don't know I mean that, though. Like, as if, as if people from Florida had never seen a shuttle launch at night before.

Like, how does that, how does that make it? You think people from New Jersey haven't seen airplanes, Jake. We have one of the busiest airports in the entire world. Think about what you're saying. Like, do you know how dense this state is? Everyone's house is under a flight path, no matter where you live. You can live in the middle of the Pine Barrens, and there's a plane over your head. We are not like, you know, it's crazy.

That's fair. So it doesn't matter. It does not matter. And then those folks moved to Florida and then they get a new experience. It's the same people, unfortunately. Sorry about that. Yeah. We have a real economic flow back and forth between our states.

Yeah. All right. Man. All right. Well, Jake, I'm going to let you lead us out because I've talked about Starcatcher before. I'm curious. I've not gauged with you, Jake, where you're at on what the hell's going on here. Here. Give me your prior's on Starcatcher. Well, okay, so the the fun part about this interview is

going to be that my prior, I haven't thought about space power in about, I don't know, two years. So all of my priors are like probably very old arguments now that Andrew's going to make fun of me about, you know, I'm going to ask about how much space on the ground it takes to use any of this in any useful way. But there are new applications now. So I'm excited to revise my head cannon on space power because yeah I think things have changed in two years so that's good to see how's that and this week and this week and a big fundraising around so congrats yeah thanks thanks yeah so maybe maybe that's where we start then is like for people who have not thought about space power for even longer than I have what is star catcher give us give us the

rundown. Yeah. So Starcatcher is really born out of my, you know, my personal and professional focus to enable people to do more in space, enable people to do new things in space. And, and every company that I've ever been involved in in the sector, which have been a few, you know, every mission we have is governed by swap, you know, size, weight, and power. And reusable launch and the increase of availability of launches really open the aperture up on the size and weight part of the equation. But the power part of the equation is still super constrained. The average satellite in Leo today has like 1,500 watts of power generation available,

which is like as much as like my kid's gaming computer uses or like a refrigerator uses. But we are in the era of the mega constellation. We're in the era of putting cell phone towers in space, of wanting high uptime, high rel, synthetic aperture radar, other remote sensing applications. And of course, we're in the era increasingly of compute at the edge, orbital data centers in space. And we're soon to be in the era of serious manufacturing in space, of serious research in space,

of permanent commercial human settlement of Leo and then eventually beyond. All of that beautiful commerce, industrial activity, needs a power grid to enable it to be successful, just like we need that on the ground, right? You know, like New York City isn't filled with a bunch of skyscrapers that all have little nuclear reactors in their basements or coal plants in their basement or whatever. That would be cool. That would be interesting if they were. That we know. Right.

Maybe the Denver airport. That has it, but, you know, not. So good. So what we're doing, Starcatcher, is we're building that energy infrastructure layer to enable this next industrialization of space to occur. We're fielding a constellation of satellites that collect energy from the sun, condition that into wavelengths that solar rays really like to consume, and then beaming that energy to other satellites in space. So they can have more power, higher concentrations of power, power and eclipse. And we can go from a world of power budgets to world of power abundance. So that's what StarCatures doing.

Man, that last line sounds like you're running for president. That's crazy. Yeah. That sounds like a campaign line from next year. You just start shopping that one around for whatever thing you're selling. I don't need that curse on me. I don't need that curses. How did that gerrymandering work out down there?

Did you end up in a good district or something? Because you might have something cooking there. Yeah, yeah. I think it's the same as it was before. All right. Yeah, it's right back to it. the, so there's, there's two levels to that that I'm curious to dig in on too is the, there's, there's like infrastructure on, or there's architectures around how you have to design spacecraft

when you have to generate all your own power. But then there's a higher level of this of the locations that things need to sit in space right now because they're generating their own power and how that might change in the future. You know, a very specific moment in time that we have here is that everybody wants to put their orbital data centers in that Terminator sun-synchronous orbit. So they are in eternal sunlight. But, you know, if we had, if everything that we know is in works today existed already, what we would do is have the power grid sit at that orbit. And then the applications probably sit elsewhere because it's going to get real busy if everybody wants to sit in that one spot. So like, I just wonder which, which end of this is

were you working from when you started? Was it, you know, your Maiden Space Days and all the other companies you were involved with, that you were annoyed that you had to worry about your power generation so locally, or that you thought there was a better way to, like, organize what is in space right now? Yeah, no.

I mean, it was definitely a combination of those two things. Like, it was super annoying at Maiden Space, dealing with power budgets. Like, in many ways, the power budget was the thing that we talked about the most, and we fit the most energy on, to try to solve for. You know, as a, as a, just a figure of merit,

one of the things that we put on the International Space Station was an Ultim 3D printer. Ultim is like a really amazing space-grade plastic. It serves a whole type of space. It's really, really cool. Printers that make, that use that material terrestrily pull like two kilowatts of energy. On the space station, we had a hard limit of a budget of like 400 watts.

So we just spent a bunch of energy trying to figure out how to make this printer more efficient. in that regime. And that ended up dragging things out, being really, really expensive. We had the same issue when we graduated to designing satellites to do manufacturing and 3D printing and robotic assembly in space. We were contemplating, turning 3D printers off in the middle of prints in the vacuum of space because we didn't have enough power on board, which is just a bunkers thing to do when you're talking about a printer on the ground, much less one that, you know, is phoning home occasionally and telling you like, hey, things are going great.

And so that was a real pain. And so when we started ideating about Starcatcher, we didn't have a name yet. I just started calling friends of mine in the industry and saying, hey, look, we have this idea. Like, this is what I think it solves. This is what, you know, it's maybe a little bit bonkers, but what do you think? Like, here's a use case, I think, that would apply to you. And almost every single one of those people said, Andrew, I don't think this is crazy. I like your use case.

And here are more use cases. And that was really encouraging. That was good. Like product market fit, you know, good customer discovery initially. And then we just rant with that from there. But, you know, I really deeply believe that this is the thing that enables that true industrialization. That right now we're very, you know, we're doing amazing things in space, but everybody's going on camping trips to do what they want to do. And, you know, brute forcing the problem.

Like, let's build the world's largest rocket to put a boatload of cell towers in space. Cool. There's a more elegant solution that relies on shared infrastructure that actually is going to be cheaper. It actually lets people focus on the core part of their business, not build a space company and then also alongside their business, alongside their consumer-facing or business-facing or government-facing, you know, core business. Right. So basically you're saying like the you hope the next Starlink doesn't have to invent SpaceX first, that's what you're trying to say. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. What we want, what we want, whether it's telecommunications or data centers or whatever, is we want those folks to say, hey, there's just location, like space is a better location to do this. And just like on the ground, we call up, you know, we call up a general contractor to build the facility. We call up, you know, some engineering firm to build the special. transceiver or or invidia to give us our chips and then we call up the local power utility and we say he goes power like that's the behavior that they all that we already know how to practice in the industry and the space sector we're totally idiosyncratic that we're like we will sell you a black box

that does the thing you do it is pretty annoying when you put it with that you have a point so i mean but the the the question that follows that if i'm going to be like if i'm going to try and poke holes in this business plan is this like that see that that that's phase that we're in now feels like a normal thing for when you're embarking into a new like geographical domain i mean it was we could draw a comparison i would love to draw the comparison to like you know the age of exploration but a bunch of like colonists land in in north america and they got to build their all their own new sewers and houses and farms and they got to do everything by it by hand right um so it seems pretty normal to be in that phase, how do you know when we're ready to step into the next one? Like, you're saying it's now,

but how do you know? Like, how do you know that we don't have 30 more years of being bespoke satellites before we have enough volume or whatever to do that? Yeah. No, it's a great question. So, first of all, I would, I would challenge, I would, I would challenge a little bit of the premise. And I would, and I would suggest that when we go into a new frontier, we, we don't go into the new frontier and then practice what we did in the age of exploration, which is like dig your own latrines and build your homes and whatever and everything you just like beautifully laid out, Jay. What we do is we take the current technology stack and we deploy it there. And this, in fact, is what you see in developing nations on our planet where, you know,

in developing areas in South America and Africa and Asia, they don't start like from a telecommunications perspective. They don't start with, you know, with the telegraph. They don't start with telephone wires. They start with, nowadays, they start with fiber and Starlink. Because that's the best infrastructure to deploy that they're leveraging. And so the, and so for us, once we field this, it becomes the default. It is the latest and greatest technological layer that people will use. Now, the beauty of our business plan of how we're approaching the market is that we are also backward compatible, is that we transmit in the visible in the near infrared. And the reason we do that is that those are wavelengths that are already compatible with existing solar rays that are fielded today,

with the power architectures that people already have. So we can send them energy when they're in eclipse. So we can send them energy, we can top them up or we can supercharge them based on how their EPA. is designed, you know, when they have less power due to seasonality, or when they're later in their, later in their operational life, because their solar rays and their batteries have degraded over time. Or when they've gotten to the end of life, and their battery system is degraded so much, their solar system, their solar rays are degraded so much, they'd have to throw the satellite away. Well, we can put more power on them and keep them alive and keep them operating.

Keep the warfighter supported by the capability that's up there. Keep commercial folks making money off of things that are fully amortized, which is something we love to do. And that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, the beauty of it. I feel like we need to talk about the technology, but then just to understand what that means, because we're just, we're sort of bandying about this idea of beaming power around. But like, what does that mean? How are you, how are you getting electricity from one satellite to another?

Yeah, yeah. That was a great question. So, so fundamentally what we're doing is, is power beaming. So our power node satellites, that's the kind of core building block of our constellation, has a large collector, a large collector who point at the sun, collect energy from the sun. Yeah, just like you can see there, it's got an array of Fresnel lenses on the front, which are flaps on the unit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a pretty, it's a pretty, it's a, it's a, it's a large, it's a larger asset. It's like an AST mobile class asset in terms of size. concentrate that energy down on specially prepared photovoltaics. We use the energy that's created there to electrically drive a multi-wavelength laser system, which is what you see right there. Those wavelengths are chosen at specific wavelengths to be in that, in the area that photovoltaics are really, really efficient at converting incoming photons into power. Because fundamentally, a solar array is a bandgap semiconductor,

which is the nerdiest thing I will endeavor to say on this call on our you know our hangout here yeah yeah basically what that means is like in a certain regime it's you know really efficient absorbing photons turning them into power outside of that regime zero percent efficient so when we talk about the efficiency of a solar array what we really are talking about is is how much of the broad spectrum the sun puts out that it converts into power. And that may be 20%, 30%, but in this visible to near infrared, we're way, way higher in terms of efficiency. So what we're doing is delivering almost like very clean energy to a client satellite

and letting them use their existing gas down for power generation. And we also take advantage of the fact that if you put more photons on a solar array, it will generate more power in a roughly linear fashion. So if you put five suns of flex on a solar rate, it'll generate five times the power per square meter that it would have generated otherwise. And so that's a really, really important thing because it enables us to take a state-of-the-art

Especlass satellite and that maybe generates a couple, kilowatts a couple, kilowatts of energy, and put five or ten suns of flux on it, excluding all of the deep infrared, which is just going to be waste heat on the spacecraft, and make it a, you know, make it a five or 10x the size spacecraft from a power perspective. So we can make, we can make a spelt SPEC-class satellite, you know, a couple million dollar bus, as powerful as a K2 bus, as a SSL bus, as a Boeing bus, as a larger buses that we've seen in the market. and and really leverage the K2 ones just like go full on Hulk like they bust out of all yeah yeah and even and even those guys look like like you know as long as you got the thermal in there like we can we can amp we can amp the power up there too because because even even those big guys like they're awesome but like they're stolen like 20 or 30 kilowatts which terrestrily is still like a pretty pretty low number right like I'm having a deal on the show on miko on Tuesday I'm telling me you're talking shit over here I'm going to send him this link no no No, no, this is synergies.

No, but seriously, though, like, it is all about... You're not kidding, though, because if you 5X, the one they're launching now, which is their 20 megawad, that is their next size class up, right? They're working on a 100 megawatt. So, yeah, their next product, if you launched your satellite today, the product they already launched is their next product. Yeah. And then they can, and then we can make a 500 kilowatt system and just go and up and up and up from there. Where does it break, though? What is the upper end?

I feel like I'm about to ask a question that you're going to tell me you can't talk about, but what happens if you point this as a satellite that's not ready for this? Is there a you've broken that satellite situation? So the power nodes have a bunch of different beams on them. And, you know, we're using lasers. And laser immediately makes you think like James Bond super villain, right? Space laser. You know, at least one.

Probably more Austin Powers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was more like that than it actually well-fellon. thought out plan. But that's not what this is because what we do is actually we spread the beam out to provide a uniform amount of light over, you know, a meter over over like the size that the solar ray is. So when it lands where the spacecraft is, we only land energy that we beam on the solar, the solar rays of the spacecraft. And we've developed and actually validated machine

learning algorithms in space, you know, on an asset in space to show that we can do. that we can identify client's spacecraft, we can estimate its pose and beam energy and show that we have the brains to lantern on the solar rays and all the bus. That's fucking wild. I'm going to ask you about four more questions about that. In the back of your mind, be ready for this. In the back of your mind, be ready for this, but it can finish your sentence at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so each one of those beams is only like one or two sons of concentration. So even if we like Even there's a little jitter And we get some on the rest of the spacecraft Like that's not going to hurt it And so then and the way that we kind of up the ante The way we up the power level is you just put more beams You know on the same spot

And then that's how you get to you know Two five ten suns flux Hmm But will it break a satellite You didn't answer the question Can you could you break a satellite Is there a way that Like what I don't need to know specific use case

Is this also a weapon? What is the I get no no I'm not That also, yes, Golden Dome for sure. But number two, what is the thing that would break? Like, is it the thing that then receives the power? Is it the batteries that you're going to overcharge? Is it the heat aspects? Yeah.

Yeah. So there's kind of two, there's two kinds of clients for us. There are clients that built and designed their spacecraft without a power grid space being in their trade space. And then there are clients that can optimize for what we are fielding. And in that first case, what you have to do is kind of go through the whole tech, the whole, the whole EPS. Say, okay, here's the solar rays. Here's the power process unit. Here's the battery. And one of those things will be a bottleneck on how on how quickly you can charge the, like the. That's like that is your cap of what you can do with the system. And so all of those are going to be mission dependent. Like they're like most of the time your PPU and your battery are sized by the like the largest instantaneous discharge that exists on the spacecraft.

which increasingly today is actually like the EP, because EP is a pretty, pretty large power hog. And so what a lot of folks do is they, you know, if they need to do a maneuver, you know, orbit rays, whatever, you take the set, like you don't do your, your main mission for a while, you charge up batteries and then you fire, fire the EP for, you know, or fire a series of, a series of fireings. That actually enables us, though, to charge those folks at a higher rate

Because we can just, you know, because that EPS can handle whatever, whatever that EP thruster or whatever the highest, the highest energy sink is. And so for those folks, you know, maybe you can only get up, maybe you can get 50% on more power for some folks. Maybe you can get to 2x on other folks. Maybe you can get more. There's some folks that you can actually get up to 5 or 10x just based on how they're architected. And then obviously folks can optimize toward us. And so the way that we don't fry our customers is we go through that exercise with them and say, okay, here's how much power you need. Here's what's useful to you because there's no point in buying something that isn't useful to you.

And then we also, in the middle, figure out, you know, like a charging schedule to beam energy to them. And then we also sample the beams return because we've got a glint off the spacecraft when you put the beam on them. And we'll make sure that that glint, you know, is in normal parameters saying, hey, we're, we're blending energy. where we say we're going to land and not getting a higher return or lower return. And because it deviates, then we turn the beam back down to like a moonlight mode and then go back and reacquire and then turn it back up. So we have automatic, you know, so we have both, you know, con-ops to make sure we protect the client satellite.

And then we also have safety measures built into the system. But if the invoices are late, then keep it, keep it crank. Jeez. So what is the, I mean, okay, so you're taking real sunlight and then you're converting it into electricity through your own system. And then you're turning on a laser with that. And then that laser is firing in another satellite, which is then converting electricity back into electricity to power their system. All along that way, you're going to have some waste heat and other inefficiencies. Like, what's your end-to-end efficiency rate?

Like, how much are you actually processing through there? So this is, so we're all being very casual here and I'm just going to give the pithy answer. It doesn't matter. Because you just put more up. What matters, what matters is the value to the customer, right? And this is a thing. And like to expand on it, like, this is the thing is like space people. We, we often really get obsessed with like mass fractions and optimizing and all those sorts of things.

But it doesn't. But the core is what actually matters is a reprobiting value. Right. Like is the, is a Falcon 9 reusable? less, like able to put less mass on orbit than a falconine expendable? Yeah. But does that matter? No, because there's a market for the amount of mass that they're putting up.

Now, you know, so, so, but to answer your question in a more direct way, once you optimize everything out, depending on the distance the client satellite is away from us, you, you, you, you will have different levels of efficiency because we're a diffraction limited system. So what that means is, you know, basically no matter how tightly you focus your beam, it's going to spread out over distance. So if you're within a few hundred kilometers of us, you know, almost every single photon on emit lands on the client solar rate. If you're like my operational radius,

that number's going to be, that number's going to be significantly less. Yeah, I guess you're right. And that like the customer doesn't care what your efficiency is. This is what you're kind of trying to say there, right? say I want this much power, how much sick it costs. A couple of sounds worth. But it theoretically would affect your like profitability, right?

Because if you can increase your efficiency, then you can service more satellites from one device. And so the follow-up question I had was going to be like, okay, what is your efficiency? And are there tech paths for you to improve that? And let's, you know, I'm curious about what the tech tree looks like. And can you, can you ramp that up? Is there a lot of opportunity there? Or is there some sort of hard physics limit that you have? and then you're building around that

so that your scale math makes a lot of sense already, right? Yeah. So the math today makes sense. The math today creates a quite profitable business. And one of the things we're pretty proud of is like the way that we've architected this, we can put just a couple of birds up

and then use the revenue from that to fund or finance the continued build out of the system. Because like I grew up, you know, building, building maiden space, you know, in an era where there wasn't VC money available in the market. So you had to just grow by your customers, grow by via profit. And we sold me in space to a private equity backed rollout, which is not typically a place where you find, you know,

just bags of cash laying around to do whatever you want. So you have to be pretty capital efficient. And so I don't believe in business models where people say, well, all I got to do is put up like 500,000 sell lights before I make it in the meaningful money. Like you can architect a system that can, can eat the elephant, eat your vision one bite at a time and provide value along the way. And so that's really the core of what we're doing at Starcatcher. You're talking to a couple software developers, so we get that.

Yeah, right. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So are there areas where last time we talked, you know, you were a couple years off from having things in space. Now you're staring down the barrel of heading up the space soon. what are the interesting locations for your satellites to sit and then what what places would you service from there like do you have a particular location matrices in mind

so you know the core core vision of the company core vision of the star catcher network has always been provide any amount of energy anywhere in leo at any time so in sunlight or in eclipse you know a few hundred watts a few hundred kilowatts one suns 10 sons and everything in between. And over the last two, like our initial thought was most people are going to care a lot about like the powering, getting power in eclipse. Over the last two years, what we've really found is that people actually just, they want, they want power when they are themselves or something because they're mostly building their con ops around like providing them, providing consistent sort of that regime. And even and even, and you would also think like, oh, people that. in like that, you know, Don Dusk SSO orbit, they don't need more power. But the most power-hungary, most power-dense applications are in those orbits already. So, you know, as we've, as we've built

up our business, what we've done is, you know, we're fortunate to have signed over 40 letters of intent with basically every flavor of space company. We've converted seven of those to power purchase agreements where people are locking in a power rate for a period of years with us, represents a really significant, you know, backlog for the stage of life of our company, about $60 million that's stage of life we're in. And that's what we're using to drive what orbits we're going to initially deploy it. You know, having a really high concentration of customers in a dawn desk as a so orbit or certain parts of that orbit, that's where we're going to put the first birds.

Folks come along and say, hey, I've got a commercial space station that I'm going to deploy. in a mid-inclination orbit, and I want 100 kilots of power on that, you know, then that's going to drive out, you know, deploying and deploying there too. But really, it's, it's about providing a capability where the customer needs it, needs it, and when they need it, not just about building an awesome, you know, you know, step along the way to, to a Dyson sphere. Step one, yeah. Okay. Huh. That's fascinating. Okay, so can you talk a little bit about, like this, I think people that think about space power have those old ideas of like microwaving it down to the ground. And I'm just trying to understand the tech bridge here.

Like is, because this laser stuff is different than a microwave. Is it useful for anything on the ground or is that like a whole other tech tree? And if so, are you pursuing that at all? Or is that just like there's no business case there? I'm curious about how we. bridge the the knowledge we have about that. Yeah. So I, I grew up on this like steady diet of science fiction and science fact. My, my mother was a high school physics teacher and, and, and basically shoved Star Trek and Robert Heinlein into my hands. And, and so I was sort of like,

you know, conditioned to be where I am today. As we, as we seek to condition our own children to to be interested in the things that we like. And so I really believe in the fantastic future of space. I believe in the future of, you know, of commercial activity on the moon, of Earth being a green field and we've moved manufacturing to the stars. And we're getting our power from, we're getting clean power from space. I also, I also am an entrepreneur. And, you know, and I believe in taking the big vision you have and breaking that down into digestible chunks and executing those chunks and providing value along the way. And what we are doing at Starcatcher, you know, building a power grid in space to make it as easy to operate in space as it is on the ground, that is a stepping stone that enables all of those things, enables that fantastic future.

we are not focused on space to ground because we see a more immediate and actionable and step-by-step attainable pathway to doing space to space. Then we see space to ground. You know, big fans of folks that are trying to do that, really big fans of folks that stay focused on trying to do that. And we are seeing folks that are adopting optical as a way to do to do. that power be me. That's, you know, I, you know, I'm a bit of a partisan. I think that my business has a much more achievable and realistic thing to do. You're just an atmosphere, you hate the atmosphere.

That's the truth. You don't want to deal with it. Yeah, you don't want to deal with it. Yeah, it's not great at keeping my power, my power beams a lot. Well, but you're absolutely right, though, because you can just very easily, like, if that, if that works out, like, would there some, either a business breakthrough or a technological breakthrough where microwaveing it down to the ground makes sense or optical thing down on the ground makes sense. You just send up a new thing that hooks

into your grid. You can just beam power to yourself and then send it down. You can have dedicated down pipes for electricity that receive from your grid and then convert, right? So I don't know. We've got a convert here, Andrew. We've got a convert. It's a very interesting concept, Jake. he's got this whole backwards and forwards compatibility thing on lockdown because it is backwards compatible but it's also yeah solar panels are only getting better i don't know if anyone's noticed so like your product gets better every year that goes on also uh it's yeah it's a it's a it's a good bit you stumbled into here you're more open you got to be more open to beaming power down to the lunar surface though right that's hey look i freaking love i freaking love

the moon. I'm glad that we're all more focused on the moon and the civil war of moon versus Mars is reaching a detente. Oh, says the loony, Jake. A detent. That's funny. That's really funny. What is the efficiency loss going from Leo to low lunar orbit on your lasers? What are we talking about? Well, the sun shines on the lunar orbit too. You can shine it from there. grid here, though, Anthony. We're trying to hook into the grid. Backwards compatible. Yeah, yeah. So this is actually, this is actually a great question because the reason that we're focused on Leo is because that's where there is a geographic concentration of customers

that have a common. There ain't shit in the mirror right now. And we are, and we are slaves to physics, you know, physics, physics doesn't care about our ambitions. It just does its thing. and and diffraction, as I mentioned earlier, really limits how far you can throw a beam in a focused way before it really spreads out. So from Leo, we could maybe provide additional moonlight,

additional like moonlight levels of flux in low orbit, but that's not really going to do anything in a power perspective. It might be interesting to have a flashlight in space. Yeah, it's pretty. But isn't more than it. Yeah. And now if we had absolutely enormous, mirrors that we could focus energy over,

that would enable so focus energy over much greater distance. But that's too expensive. Yeah. That tracks. Flashlight in space, if the resting state of your hardware was, just light up the lunar base. And then if you've got something to do,

power a satellite, it's kind of a funny, like, two mode switch you've got. Yeah. Yeah. And there's uses for flashlights in space, right? from a, you know, our friends in the national security arena, terrestrily, we use searchlights all the time to, to protect our bases on the ground.

That's something that actually just kind of falls out of what we're doing. That's the side effect. You honestly, you just, I don't know if you know this, as the moon, whenever you are. You just saved the neorectilinear halo orbit. The only reason we'll put something there is to light up the lunar base at the South Pole in the future. Because you got it from 70,000, 7,000, kilometers out. You can light up the base nicely. You put a couple so that you've always got one

hanging out near Apogee or Aploon, I guess that would be. And it's not overpowering the base, but it's just some nice lighting, melting the ice a little bit. Like, you got something cooking. Here, we're back. NRA is back, baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, hopefully Jared's listening. And, you know, we can send him this idea, you know. Have you considered the lighting of the base? Yeah, yeah. Who was it? They thought it was the drive? director that faked the moon landings that

R. S. C. Clark, right? No, no, no, the guy that did 2001, they thought did did, like, Phil. Kubrick, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're just, we're just the next generation. Yeah, yeah.

Not, the lighting in Capricorn 1 was not as good as the Apollo moon landing, because I'll tell you that. It was, uh, that was a worst movie, so, yeah. If you want to see what it would have looked like, check that movie out. Yeah. All right, we got to talk about this whole. All right, I have a couple branches.

One, I'm struggling with the orbital data center location selection, right? We want the Terminator's Sunsynchronous orbit. But there's cases where some of the things that are entering the market, the K2 buses and the like, that seem to be better positioned to like hang out in medium Earth orbit, where you can put a few of them up and reach a distribution network. or something like that, and have more room for gigantic solar arrays, et cetera, et cetera. That is really not even in the cards right now for anyone talking about orbital data centers, even though it does seem to be the most soon-to-market options for high power generation.

Just in terms of like, I don't know, I mean, even the ASD Space Mobile, right? Like their initial satellite, not the one they're flying, but the initially proposed one. Like even NASA had problems with that. They put out a statement of like, I don't think we should fly something with this big of an array in that orbit because it's just too physically large. So how big are we going to get in these sunsynchronous orbits before we run into problems from just like a congestion perspective and we're forced to start adopting other locations?

Like, I don't know, this is a very wandery question, but I'm wondering how you're looking at this market and saying like, y'all are hanging out, are they hanging out in the wrong spot? Do you think they should go somewhere else? Or are you just like is what it is? I think that we underestimate how big the sky is, first of all. Definitely that. I'm one of those people too.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot of, there's good, there's good academic papers out there that, you know, show the carrying capacity of Leo is like millions of satellites. Now, you know, our friends in the astrophysics community will say, hey, like, we have, we have these telescopes. We like to look at the stars and do Nobel Prize winning physics. And I'm a big supporter of that. You know, before I, before I lost my way and became a lawyer and then found my way again and became a space hot. I wanted to be a cosmologist. And my modern space entrepreneur response to that is, well, let's just put the telescopes in space. Yeah. Let's just put it above the land.

They'll be better, too. It'll be better telescopes. Yeah. Again, you hate the atmosphere. Yeah, you and the atmosphere, just got it out for each other. Jeez. You know, no, no, no. The atmosphere is like special, is like special relativity.

It applies in one specific area. It's really good. Other areas, not so much. Yeah, but I, great for breathing. I believe actually that the business models will drive orbital data centers into other orbits. Because my view on compute in space is that there are immediate term, medium term, and long-term use cases. The immediate term use cases, we already see. There's already GPUs in space processing imagery.

So we're sending analyzed images down, analyzed data down, not wrong compressed data. And that's great. I think the medium-term use cases are basically the equivalent of content distribution networks, where more and more we're relying on cell phone towers in space, Starlink, ASC Mobile, etc. For the comms in our daily lives. Like where I live, I only have Starlink. And, you know, my phone talks to satellites occasionally. Well, the more that drives, the more having a, you know, a CDN with, you know, the copy of

with a local copy of YouTube on it so I can watch whatever I want to watch easier and faster, just like you do terrestrily, that's going to play out. That doesn't work if you base all that stuff in SSO, right? It needs to be a bit in plenty of treatments. Inference is really the same way. And eventually, one day, not in two or three years,

but one day, it may actually reach cost parity to put data centers in space as it is on the ground. In the more immediate term, of course, you know, if you just can get it up, if you can just have more up and get that up, they get the capacity online. Whereas when you can't terrestrily, because of regulation and power availability, you know, people are paying put loads for that. But that's kind of an ephemeral. It feels like an ephemeral business. It's a now thing, not up for everything. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, to your question, Anthony, yeah, I don't think that I don't think everybody is going to be exclusively in. you know, dawn, dusk. So orbits... It never even really tracked to me. Like, I don't know why anyone... No one's really been talking about the fact that a multi-orbit architecture makes sense in this case, where, like, there's some workloads that, yes, are going to go up to your nearest satellite

and come back down. But there's others, you know, when I, when Jake or I are doing a big feature and we need, like, a lot of thinking time, kick that out to something out at Mio, that it can sit and work for a while and then send me the results down. That isn't really a conversation yet. It's just about, well, the power is available in this Terminator's Sunsynchronous Orbit. And it's only about power, not about use case. Yeah.

Well, I think we are, people are getting more and more refined about this. You know, and that's natural as an industry's birth, right? People say, gee whiz, isn't this awesome. They're like, yeah, that's really interesting. And then, or that's crazy. And then you start refining, refining the business case and say, no, actually, like, here's the specific way that it's useful to you, and then people buy. And then that drives, that opens up the, you know, the operative for the more ambitious elements.

There's an aspect to this all, too, that's like real estate focused, where everybody's got to claim their segment, their plane, their altitude. Are you insulated from that because you want to fly like next to whatever those are? And it's like ideal if you're a little bit off access a little bit out of plane, a little bit higher, a little bit lower, and you can beam into those locations? Is that, that's got to be a nice, you're the only one that cares about, like, the edges of those popular areas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you know, Ray Kroc was buying up, like, the corner lots in every intersection in America for a while to put McDonald's on. We're, we're the gas station. We don't have to be right there. We can be a couple, we can be a couple

one turn away near the highway or something. Yeah. Yeah. Rest stops. You're the truck stops of space. I like it. That's right. that's less catchy than whatever your thing. What was your thing? Power abundance. Was it power? Abundance instead of budgets.

Yeah. Power budgets to power abundance. Yeah. I'm totally making like Andrew Rush campaign signage that says that on it. For sure. I'm going to make campaign buttons and send you some. Yeah. I look forward to that.

I look forward to that. I remember there's, there's, I remember the old like Jim Bridenstein fan club buttons from, you know, from Oh man. From IAZ. Do you remember that only from being at that IAC or did we talk about this at some other

moments? I still have like one or two of them. Oh shit. Yeah. You have a story history of campaign. That's true. It's a great point. And how they rise and fall, you know.

Things come, things go, things turn into other things. And here we are. If you've like a bunch of space. right? That's the other follow-up. Yeah, we haven't hit that yet, but we'll find out. We'll see. All right. We never talked about tracking these satellites, Jake.

You had some questions about placing these beams on solar arrays. Yeah, well, that's kind of related to the efficiency thing, right? So, I mean, the technological thing about, are you considering shapes of, you know, arrays? And actually, like, can you, as your beam forming, like, do you have two-dimensional control over what that? Can you make like a star pattern? Can you write Jake's name somewhere? That's what he wants to know. If I put a satellite up with solar rays as in my name, can you hit that with 100%?

Can you burn a crop field in Alberta that says Jake Robbins? No, no burning. No, great. No burning. No. No. So, but I mean, so that's part of the, that's built into the architecture, right? is, you know, we're, you know, we don't, we don't have the, you know, in North Korea,

everybody has the same haircut. We don't have like that, that equivalent for soul rays, where everybody's got the exact same solar rate, you know, so, so you have to, so the sizing of the beam, how many beams, how you space them out, all of that is, like, is fed by, you know, by the, by the, by the many, many combinations and configurations that exist, that exist in the market, yeah. Yeah. And is it like, I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm realizing my knowledge. I thought I was doing really well, but my knowledge of householder panels works is maybe less than I thought.

But like, does it matter if you like spread, you know, a certain amount of power over the whole array versus concentrated onto one spot? Like can the cells like ramp up if there's enough energy or do you have, is it better to spread it around? So the cells really like uniform illumination. Okay.

You know, and that's what you generally get in space is you get uniform. You get uniform aluminum. Right, right. I'm realizing now that when a tree casts shade on my solar panels is bad news because I have a string inverter. So it brings the whole thing down. Yeah. Yeah.

So we have to make uniform, right? It'd be easier. It'd be easier if we could just put, you know, a spot beam the size of my fist right in the middle of one. And then that one cell generates all the power. Right, right. But, you know, that's not how that works. And how, I'm going down the tech tree here, but how how. how many satellites can you do it one time?

Like how many lasers are you carrying on one of these satellites? And what is the, what's the total capacity of one of your proposed? Yeah. Catchers, right? Yeah. So each power node is designed to service. It's a one to many architecture.

So designed to service many satellites simultaneously. And that's also a really important point. Because it was just like, hey, I'm going to send this up and be like a, like a, you know, a boost, a booster pack for you for that one satellite. The economics absolutely don't make. No, no. So it's built around the notion that the architecture is built around being able to service multiple satellites simultaneously.

And as satellites cross in and out of the kind of area of regard that we have, servicing them, you know, servicing them, you know, like sporadically. Of course, once you build out the full network, it's just like, you know, the cell phone tower network in the United States, right? On the highway, you're getting handed off from one to another. And just like that architecture, you're, you know, you have great economies of scale because you're using you're using things intermittently. And we also have designed it so that, you know, so that we don't have to provide a uniform amount of energy for folks.

That where you say, hey, like, I'm going to be, I'm a SARS satellite. I need to go take like a whole bunch of pictures of this one area in the Middle East because things are really heating up. And so we can give you more power so you can do that. But if you're like, oh, you know, customer doesn't want a whole bunch of pictures right now. they don't even have to buy power from us, just like you do, just like you do in your home. Yeah.

What's the, like, do you need to be traveling somewhat co-planar with these satellites or what is the sort of maximum speed differential we're talking? Yeah, so the worst speed differential,

of course, is like going oral, like anti-over velocity. Yeah. Stay in plain, anti-obl velocity. That's more of just a risk, generally,

than like a business problem. Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. Exactly same altitude. That's bad. But I think, you know, so what we look at is slightly offset. Yeah.

You know, so we've actually demonstrated the ability to slew at, you know, essentially two X orbital velocity by doing ground to two space and tracking folks and showing, hey, we can, we can, we can slew our power beaming hardware at the appropriate rates and maintain a lock on, on that spacecraft. as if we were powering it at, you know, enormous distances. The distance is rude, we would be be in power. And that's actually a question we got a lot early on. It's like, hey, like, how do you locate folks?

How do you track them? Can you slew fast enough? Can you slew? And, you know, without jitter, and we've checked off all those boxes and showed them, like, yes, we can do those things. And you said earlier, classifying the shape that you're dealing with. So do you have imagers on your own satellites? you're going to be buying that from other providers,

like buying some mirror-thrimaging from a MaxR or something? Yeah, yeah. So we have a, we'll have an image or onboard our spacecraft that we'll be able to spot the client satellite optically, estimate its pose, and, you know, and then, and the beam energy where, you know, as a perfect. What's the thing, the Glomar Explorer, man? Like, this is the Glomar Explorer of all Glomar Explorers.

I know you got this use case in mind, God damn, and I know some people that I recently was in the Pentagon who would be like, you do what? How many things can you do? Geez. Well, if they're listening, then hopefully you don't think give me a call. They are. I know them. And they're, I know they already know you.

So this is great. Yeah. It's crazy. Wild. Okay. This is one that like I totally love talking about this stuff because, and we even had some people in the chat saying this that like when they heard you on Miko two years ago, this sounded totally insane.

they're like, okay, I see where this is going. Like, I think that's everyone's experience with hearing this. Like, you're going to do that, that works? And then you walk through it and you get to, oh, shit, this does track. Like, I totally understand this. More so than a lot of infrastructure and space conversations we have. What's the biggest thing that you lose sleepover? Like, this is the part I'm nervous about it.

This is the downfall moment that we need to watch out for. Yeah, yeah. You know, space is a team sport. Nobody, nobody gets to space without relying on other folks. Nobody, nobody gets to operate without relying on customers and vendors and everything. And, and that's, those are the greatest relationships, but those are also often your biggest exposure points, right? Is, you know, because everybody, everybody at Sarkatro, like, the team's, the team is amazing. Everything that we've accomplished, like, to show, like, as you said, like,

Two years ago, people were like, are you sure, Andrew? And now people are like, oh, okay, I get it. That's because we have a really amazing team that, like, has executed and shown, like, okay, first we're going to be measurable power. We got to do that in a football stadium. That was cool. Then we're going to be useful power. We got to do that on the runway to the plane the shuttle on. That was cooler.

Then we got to do the tracking algorithms in space. And soon in the future, we're going to do it. We're going to do the full of power beating in demonstration in space. And that's all because these folks are just locked in. and doing it. And when, you know, when you hit that, when you hit that wall, you know, you hit that engineering hurdle, they clear it. And, and, you know, and our external partners are also right there with us, but making sure that we're all rowing together and delivering, that's the stuff that that's the thing that I, you know, I focus on that and that and just making sure that

everybody has the resources to meet the moment. Because I, I really believe in the fantastic future space and I want to make it happen. Right. Like, that's, why I'm doing this and not selling you know components because this I'm telling Neil I'm telling Neil this on Tuesday man some shit's talking going on there's nothing wrong with satellite buses

like satellite buses are amazing and it's all it all builds on top of one another but but this is the way this to me is the greatest bottleneck for delivering on that fed future after reusable launch like a bigger batter satellite great but like we need to make it easier for every bigger and batter

satellite to be to to deliver for humanity well I mean I I don't know I can't think of a time where like an idea or business case has been like this clear to me like I I can find almost no fault in anything you're saying which is which is rare because I'm a pretty cynical guy these days yeah that's true this is sound this is sounding very, very good. I'd have to see the economics. Like, that's the last number. Oh, come on. Yeah. Afterwards, we'll call me up and show

me your P&L and we'll talk about some of these things. You know, and we'll go over. But, but the idea sounds very, very good. I'm pretty impressed. The balance sheet is really good right now because we just closed a pretty amazing thing. Yeah. Plus $65 million on the

asset list. It's a great month. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, that's, we can make that happen, I guess. That's that's just, that's implementation details. So that's, that's very exciting. This is really cool. I don't know how, I did not have this on my radar. And this is like, this is rad.

That's pretty cool. I think it's awesome. It's especially because you spent so much time on like the application side of this equation, right? And I feel, I feel like that's why it feels, we got a lot of weird pitches and emails. And not that this was one, but like, we do, we do encounter the weirdest ideas in via our inbox. And most of them are like, you know, people ended up doing a thing because it was sort of like their first idea didn't really pan out and they just switched to something else.

Whereas it, this storyline feels so natural for like, guy who tried to run a lot of 3D printing in space wants more power. Like that's a great storyline, you know, like, oh, okay, I see the problem. That tracks. I can do that math. So there's, that's the aspect of like that you could tell when a business model is genuine, And we love those things. I'm probably just biased as well because I'm like, I'm like rewiring my house right now, Andrew.

Like I live in Mexico and it's a absolute nightmare of wiring and I have like not enough power. And so I've been like the last six months, I've just been, it's my entire life has been like running conduits and wire in my house. And so like I guess when you show up and be like, I got lots of power and it's the space. Oh my God. Everyone must want this because I do. And Jake's trying to make things not melt. so he's been specifically tapped into the orbital data center conversation. And yeah.

There you go. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, we've like, you know, my college dorm room was that same thing, right? If you turn on, if you turn on a microwave, like the stove would trim kind of thing. And that's been, that's how satellites are today.

And that's just, that's not meeting the moment. That's not the future that we can. I can't have a hot tub if we keep doing it this way. So we need to keep. We need to keep. Right, right, right, yeah. Artemis 22 will have a hot tub because our catch-gated down. And light from NRHL.

Exactly. All right. We're over, but what is the last, like, what is the thing going up to space? When is it happening? What are we watching?

What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we've taken this very crawl, walk, run,

very hardware-rich approach to demonstrating the technology, validing the technology via terrestrial. and our first in-space demonstration. And that's what we're doing going forward. You know, we'll have multiple missions where we show, hey, we can do this in the space environment, we'll scale it up to be useful, start delivering power to people,

and get to operational. That's really the focus for us, like after we've closed this Series A, you know, couldn't be proud of to have the partners that we have with B Capital and Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures. really, really amazing folks and a round that is appreciably larger than almost every

series A in the space tech industry because of the exceptional progress that the team has had, because of the exceptional business attraction we've had. And from folks, like, as we've converted Jake here on this episode, said, okay, I get it. It's like, oh yeah, I really, really mean this. That's, you know, and so

having the capital to drive forward that and really, really let the team just take the shackles off even more is what I'm really excited to see. Well, come back on when the first piece goes up because we're, we probably didn't even exhaust our question list, Jake. You probably got a lot more. No, so many more questions. Well, thanks for hanging out with us, Andrew. You're always fun to hang out with. There's a lot of people that come on that are not as game to just talk and get into weird, nerdy, segments and down rabbit holes and horse shit around.

So this is like always our favorite thing to do. So thanks again. Highland of a day, guys. This is great. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Jake, I think we're, we don't have anything to talk about next week.

Yeah, we're still in no man's land here, I think, in terms of a guest. So we'll get back to you. Listen, we've earned a break for a couple of weeks. We did. absolute insanity from ignition through Artemis to Mayhem. Yeah. So everybody else also wanted breaks responding to our emails. So it's fine.

That's what happened. Except for him. So thanks again. We'll see you next week again, everyone. Bye. Thanks, everyone. Thanks.