Off-Nominal - 248 - Earth Quality (with Jason Dunn)

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Outpost Co-Founder and CEO Jason Dunn to talk about their Earth return vehicles across national security, in-space manufacturing, and other industries. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 248 - Earth Quality (with Jason Dunn) - YouTube Outpost Follow Jason Jason Dunn | LinkedIn 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

DLS and go for main engine, start. Go at throttle up. Negative return. Hello, Jake. I think I've got the most particles of Canada around me today, as the Canadian wildfires have made their way here. This is true. So I think I'm touching parts of Canada, I think. So I just want you to know that.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks for taking it. I don't miss the fire part of Canada. Yeah. There's a brief window when the smoke's arriving, where it smells. good because it smells like trees and then it smells like fire and it's always that little part of the beginning where you're like oh yeah yeah little blessings and uh jason we've got you in from a place that usually has wildfire smoke but maybe doesn't at the moment with your big

california flag in the back yeah i'm los angeles that's right um no i feel you i mean i i i think I'm conditioned at the first little smell of smoke. I can't tell you how many mornings I jump out of bed early because I think I smell wildfire. It's a chimney or it's a barbecue or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's wildfire PTSD now is like a thing that people have. Only in California, though, can you get up at a time at which someone might be barbecuing? that's a very California timeline

Jason well this time of the year you know the sun is up like the sun is up I don't know before I'm awake and then it's you know goes down late so don't get us going on whether we think we should do the permanent daylight saving thing or not they'll be outed as the guy who likes it

so it's not where I was headed but if you want to take it there you got to get in the culture war it's how you get the views you know yes you very we're very thankful that you responded to our, I would say responded to our call, but more of our like, we should probably

talk more about reentry systems generally, because it's a big hot topic. Jake was particularly intrigued. Yeah, yeah. I just been like, it felt like all of a sudden, all the news I was reading was like different ideas and new companies and contracts being awarded and things being developed of this. All of a sudden, it's like, I need to care a lot about reentry services and normal logistics. And so we were we were like ad living on the show and then I was like we should probably clean this up a little bit and get some experts on here. We were just like spitballing well maybe this is good. Well maybe this is good but we need to talk to some people. So we're excited that you're here to tell us what the what the stick is. Well I can't wait. I mean let's spitball those ideas too.

Maybe we can't turn them into reality. I have some good ones. Yeah. You may not like them but they can't wait. I can't wait. Well, you're in California. So time zones are not great for you and you look like you're in a location where you would not have brought a drink, but maybe you have something and I don't know about it. Oh, look at you. All right. Barbecue start early. So does this. What do you got? What is that? I've got a hazy IPA today. Nice. I should have had one of those. Do you guys have? I should have one. I'm still working through my batch of freshies, Jake. Freshies, yeah. Tone and freshies. Look at that little tractor. That looks nice. That little tractor. It kind of reminds me of spright. Yeah, it does have a very sprite color tone to it.

What does this one remind you? This is a Topo Chico. Paloma. Paloma. That's a good one. I had that recently. This is a good example of how in Mexico just incorporates English in for fun. So this is drinks, Mexinos. I don't know what's going on there.

Let's pour some drinks, you know, like what's a dope word. But no. So we've got to hit cross market. You know, it's good. Cheers, guys. Cheers. Cheers. Yeah, you know, where are we starting with this, Jake?

Because you've got questions. Yeah, well, I mean, why don't you just give us a, give us a stick first, like, you know, who is outpost? Who are you? And what's the, what's the pitch here? What are you guys working on? We're live, right? So live. Yeah.

We got people watching. Yep. All right. Yeah, so don't say anything really controversial. Or do, and we'll have more people watching. All right. I'll give you the quick, sort of quick background, and then you guys pick on anything you want and we'll dive deeper.

So I started working on Outpost because prior to this, I was basically the customer of Earth Return. I had built a company called Made in Space. We put the first 3D printers on Space Station. then we did something really cool. We manufactured fiber optic cables on the space station showed that you can make a more pure fiber optic in zero gravity. And basically the hardest problem we had to solve

was getting stuff back from the space station. I always thought it would be like building machines that operate in zero gravity, but the logistics piece was really the hardest. And so we beat my head against the wall for a while of why there's not a vibrant Earth return economy. It's so easy to get things into space now with all the launch opportunities, but really no way to get stuff back. So after we sold Made In Space in 2020, I went kind of to the drawing board of how would you build an Earth Return company?

And Outpost is really kind of derived from first principles, knowing, having been the customer, there's really two big requirements. If you can hit those requirements, I think you win Earth return. And I can tell you what those are in a second, but I think winning Earth return and just building that pillar of the space ecosystem is critically important. I've built all my businesses on a bet on the future, a bet that I think is a pretty good bet to make. And the bet here is that space will have a return lane.

It's not a one-way street forever. And I would wager that one day there's going to be more things coming from space to Earth. then Earth to space. So that's kind of the future we're building towards. And in order to get there, you have to have a return system that's scalable in size so that it can do multi-ton return. And you also have to have accurate landing. So no more crash downs or splash downs, but bring these things to landing sites.

So that's what we're doing. So our vehicle is called carry-all, and it solves that in a pretty interesting way. Carry out block three. Yeah. I love this. It's just like straight up looks like it's a container. Like this is a, it's very, you must be taking inspiration. Basically, we reinvised the, we've reenvisioned the 20-foot shipping container.

And the idea is let's design the shipping container for space that you can ship around the world, get it anywhere on the planet very quickly. So this opens a door to logistics, point-to-point logistics at scale. and then it also opens the door to space manufacturing at scale. It means putting an entire factory in the space and not just small science experiments, but bringing back multiple tons of payload. I like the, we've re-envisioned the shipping container.

You need to do a very Johnny I video where you're like, we've reimagined the shipping container and it's just an octagon. I'm sure there's more to it, but it's like, now it's a shipping container. We cut the corner. Honestly, it looks a little bit different. And this was, I think we'll roll out like the real, the real design pretty soon.

Oh, it's one of those cases. A little bit different. Yeah. But this was some early, early concept art of the idea. Is it still an octagon though? No. I mean, there's a little triangle now. They're the strongest shape.

There's a little bit of angularity to it. Yeah, that's just a triangle. Piece of Epcon. No, but it actually like, the real thing. truly does take up the form factor and the standard of today's shipping container. So once it lands, you know, somewhere on the other side of the planet, you can put it on a truck and get it out of there. Which is interesting, this whole system doesn't really require any landing infrastructure. So if you imagine, like, if you wanted to put a starship somewhere, you're going to need

a whole landing site infrastructure with the ability to launch that thing back out of that place. and you don't need that with this system. Real drop shipping. Yeah. Yeah. It just gets into, just hooks into whatever regular terrestrial system is there to get it back home. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like the thinking is like if you build something that works with today's intermodal transport, then it becomes a new layer of logistics and not some entirely new thing that has nothing to do with what we've already been using. Yeah. Yeah. So you have this whole, now, now I'm thinking a couple of

a couple of shows back. We had Andrew Rush on talking about Starcatcher. So, yeah, uh, did y'all split and have a whole tech tree of like, all the, here's the list of things that annoyed us when we were working on maiden space. I'm going to go do this one. Cool, I'm going to go do this one. And I can't because I, there's some similarities in the way that you just talked about that, right? But what he talked about with Starcatcher is how it interrupts with the infrastructure that exists in space today, how it plays nicely with those things. You're thinking about that with Earth transport, very practical ways that you're hooking the space industry into existing things. So I like that.

Yeah. I mean, there's like the subtle point there is the leadership team from Made in Space after the sale have all been able to go off and build the next big space company. So there's a bit of pride there that we were all able to go build something that was necessary. And I think a lot of it has to do with, like in all startups and all industries, timing the market is critical. But timing the market in space is really, really hard. Everything's, you know, everything's always off. Like, we're supposed to have like, I think SpaceX was supposed to have a city on Mars at this point. And, you know, nothing's ever on time. So,

timing is difficult. I think made in space was not timed perfectly well. It's probably a decade too early. But the benefit of that was that the team that we had building Maiden Space had a looking glass into the future. So it's not surprising that now you have all the made in space leadership building companies that are critically important and the timing happens to finally be right to do it. So you're going to circle back and do Made in Space 2 once you've got, okay, we solved all the parts that held us up or annoyed us last time. Like now let's go do the thing again in the right time? It's a very big piece of outposts.

So we say that we're a logistics and manufacturing company. And the reason we say that is some of the best companies to exist ever are logistics and manufacturing businesses. I mean, SpaceX to a degree is that. They're a logistics launch company, but they have a manufactured product in Starlink. America's largest privately held business, Cargill, they do something like $150 billion in top line revenue is. a producer of soybeans and they own all the cargo ships to move them around the world.

So logistics and manufacturing go hand in hand. And space is a really interesting white space where you can go after logistics and manufacturing in a way that hasn't been done before. So moving things around the world through space for logistics, but then also putting the factory on orbit and manufacturing things that can't be made on the ground. So we have an element to outpost is the manufacturing piece. definitely leveraging what we had learned that made in space. I would love to dig into like the maybe the manufacturing side first because this is an interesting

like the I think the biggest questions I have with this are what you know what are the good use cases today and in the future for doing something in space and how do we how do you protect yourself from like because there's a difference between like this only works in space and so we're going to build that and do that there versus like it currently is better in space because we haven't figured out how to do it better on Earth. But if like if they bring the price down on Earth, then all of a sudden the space business case evaporates, right? Because there's just there's so much extra logistics to getting it up there.

So how do you like differentiate that? And what are some, maybe some examples of things you're going after to sort of help illustrate that? Yeah. So this was, what it comes down to is there there is there is. a there's a grouping of products that you could make on Earth, but you can't make them as good as if you made them in space. And that's because by turning off gravity, you get a more, a more pure product. And these tend to be products that are crystalline in nature. So optical fiber,

semiconductors, silicon wafers, diamonds, even some pharmaceuticals tie into that. And we've known this since the space shuttle days. Like there's been experiment after experiment of growing crystals in microgravity. So there's a lot of understanding there. And these are things that, of course, you can make a fiber optic

cable on Earth. You can make silica fibers. But if you make fluoride-based fibers in zero-gravity, you can produce a fiber that is 15 times lower loss than silica fiber, meaning you can go 15 times a distance before a repeater. Or you

you know, you have lower power usage. You have more bandwidth than that fiber. So you get something different in space than on the ground. And inherently is a very big value to that. And a value that's worth going all the way to space to make it and bring it back. And so that's where we start for Outposts is leveraging those types of manufacturing techniques and those products. And I will say that's kind of where it starts.

the vision that we have for the company is that industry is going to start to move to space. And it's going to be for reasons that aren't entirely because it's the only place you could make it. Right. There's going to be things that we make in space. You could absolutely make on Earth. But there's going to be other reasons that's more valuable to do it there. And one of which would be the fact that it's just less polluting to our environment. We can move some of the dirty manufacturing off the planet over time and reduce the impact that our technological growth places on the planet.

So that's a vision that we have and we want to see that happen. That's why outposts exist. But we have to start with manufactured products that are actually and truly better to produce in space in order to grab a foothold. And by doing that, we can grow a very valuable business, do all those things that a business needs to do to grow. but the underlying piece is we're building the foundation of infrastructure for Earth return, for platforms on orbit, for manufacturing on orbit, that then all these other industries can start to leverage and move into space. So hence the name outposts.

When all these companies need an outpost in space, they'll have it. And I was reading there's like some, maybe this was, pharmaceuticals or something else, but there were some use cases where like you would go to space and you would grow some sort of like seed product and then bring that home and then it would continue to be manufactured on earth. And then I guess there would be other things where like, no, everything has to be made in space. And so you're going to have to like, you know, really to scale up volume.

You have to just send more to space and have like a really, you know, a lot coming back. What's the like what's the breakdown there? Are we seeing more of the first or the second or mix? Like what are we looking at? You've seen a lot of the first so far. So the pharmaceuticals are a big example of that where drugs are discovered in microbreeding. gravity, but then the scaled up production happens on the ground. And there's still a lot of value into the discovery phase.

But obviously the scaled production isn't happening that way. We're more interested in things that aren't returned in small vials in a small space capsule, but things that need to be returned in a shipping container. And those are the things that you can't learn in space, but then replicate on the ground. There's no way to create zero gravity on Earth. You can obviously go into a parabolic aircraft and get 20 seconds of microgravity or a drop tower and get a couple seconds of microgravity. But to make optical fibers in space or in zero gravity, you need weeks, months to do it in definitely several days. So it's not a it's not a quick process.

It's still technically a quick mission. It's a mission that might be on orbit for a month, but it's not something you could do any way on Earth or through airplane flights. That's the tip of the iceberg. Like these fibers today made on Earth, like with Earth quality, like not good quality, sell for a million dollars a kilogram. Okay? So like all you have to do, like if you want to do quick unit economics, launch cost is five to $7,000 a kilogram, depending on how you go about it. And here's a product that it's like literally you're taking this material, you're sending it

into space and when it comes back, it's worth a million dollars a kilogram. So that's the value. Then as launch cost comes down, you start to unlock other things that you can manufacture on orbit and sell into markets. So there's a, we have a whole mapping of like what manufactured products make sense to do as launch costs hit certain price points. That makes sense? Million bucks kilogram.

Yeah, I would buy a million dollars for $5,000. And that's the crappy Earth. That's the crappy Earth. I know. I love that. Earth quality. Like, shit. Yeah.

Earth quality. Yeah. Huh. Okay. That's good. So I like that. And I like the working mechanism of, I bet more stuff will come back to Earth

over the course of history, then we'll leave Earth. That is a... I mean, everything we need to survive in space is up there. We've got asteroids with, you know, all the materials we need, all the resources, the lunar dirt has resources in it. I think at some point, like, you have to... You always have to send the humans. So there's going to be a launch for that.

And I do wonder, like, where does the toilet paper come from in space? like that the carbon, that seems like a problem that has to get solved. But besides that, like it seems like everything else is up there. Bidase only, man. Exactly.

Yeah. Vacuums and badees. That's it. Base vacuum, bidet system. Where is the toilet paper come from? Yeah. Great point.

All right. So wait, here's quality. Where does the toilet paper come from? Yeah. All right. So I think the thing, though, that we need to figure out

is why Jake has been noticing so much more talk now about reentry and return systems. Is there something about that formula that you're just laying out that prices are dropping and it's creating more awareness that we're going to need this in the future and that's why this is becoming more prevalent? It's, you know, do you feel this as well? Do you feel like there's always been this much noise and it's just now making it public? What's your read on that? I think there's a few reasons, but there's one big elephant in the room that's probably the lion's share of why it's part of so many conversations all of a sudden, which I noticed in probably November of last year, November, December is when the uptick started.

And it all started at the exact same time that it started to be rumored that SpaceX would IPO, right? And I think if you're the capital markets, it's kind of a herd mentality. Like you're moving towards the next big thing. And when you have the world's biggest IPO in history happening and it was a space logistics company, the capital market start to shift and say, okay, that was a big deal investment and a lot of money was made. What's the next thing? and you start doing comparables and you say, well, logistics is clearly a big piece of what made SpaceX so valuable.

What's the next piece of space logistics? And then the obvious thing is the return piece. Like if they made, they built a business on going up, what are the things that we can do coming down? And that generated some questioning and some enthusiasm in the capital markets that then led to all the discussion that you're hearing. But then when you look at who's working on it, like the companies that are far ahead, like outposts have been working on this much longer than it's been discussed. But again, that's all about timing the market and doing things at the right moment. And then there's the difference.

You started to really notice the conversation. Is it more like in the last six months? Well, so the problem with being a lowercase J.A. journalist like us is we don't always write it down. We just go on vibes. And so, well, I just, I feel like there's been, you know, there's been news from you guys. There's been news from, uh, we got like,

I mean, SpaceX too. SpaceX is getting into it now. Um, that's, that was probably the biggest thing that tipped it off for me is like, whenever SpaceX is like, we're getting into this, it's like, well, now I, I, I thought maybe it was up to my judgment that I had to pay attention, but now I have to pay attention. Um, but yeah. Well, changes the scale of it too, right?

Because obviously Varda's been. doing their thing on a couple of missions now, and that's gotten press and gotten attention. And, you know, Rockalab had their interactions with that program on the front end as well. But I think there's something different about the shape and the scale of missions like that versus what you're talking about versus what we would imagine SpaceX is interested in this because there's, there are different scales that are being talked about now. And those are different as well from the ones that. clearly have golden dome overlap of like all right you're saying you're saying earth return system

but it certainly looks like you're making a ballistic missile nose zone yeah right so like those are yours yours looks like a shipping container i don't know if you would also go and build one that looks more like an interceptor but there are a lot of people saying we do earth return and it means like yes for heavy pieces of metal or explosives that are returning to earth and those are different classes as well yeah yep look there's i think that um there's a lot of different types of airplanes out there, right? There's fighter jets. There's C-130 cargo aircraft.

There's commercial airliners. And nobody would look at one. You wouldn't look at a fighter jet and say that thing sucks. It can't move any type of payload compared to a C-130. There's going to be different earth return vehicles for different use cases. Certainly, you're right. Some are going to be for defense applications, for interceptors, you know, what happens? have you. Our wager is that the lion's share of the market is going to be in logistics,

in actual commercial logistics and serving a big commercial use case. And that the winning bet is to make a vehicle that is capable of doing that at scale. And not because the other use cases aren't good, but because this is a more valuable business to build, a more enduring business. And by the way, it serves a huge national defense and military use case. But what we've been developing is something that is really a life-saving technology. When you need to put cargo into a condested region, a place that's very hard to reach, the almost always, the thing that's needed there is not this big, right? It's like it's what would go in a shipping container. It's putting a huge amount of supplies.

is putting a communication sample. Yeah. payload, you know, like a power station or communication station. I really need a piece of Benu to get me out of this jam. That would solve it. So, you know, like we're very fortunate to have partners within the U.S. military to develop our technology. But it's really for those use cases. And I'm very excited about it because we are now learning how to do.

do point-to-point logistics through space for that user who can afford today's launch price, right? So we're going to be able to do it for those use cases and we're going to get really good at it. And as launch cost comes down, we can start to introduce it into the commercial market. And that makes so much more sense to me than, you know, landing a starship in a battlefield. Like, you can imagine your version of this a lot easier in those cases than, you know, imagining a starship coming back down and landing that field. and then having a whole starship there. A whole starship that is like now you have the most advanced piece of technology

that we could possibly have sent to the worst spot to send it. Yeah, I just drop some ITAR technology in the middle of the war. A little bit of an ITAR challenge. There's a, the people who need the supplies that you're going to land from space very much do not want to stand in one spot for a long time and they're going to get those supplies and run. And you don't want to leave anything there that you wouldn't want the adversary getting their hands on. The thing that we're landing with Cariole is literally the box. It's like the shipping

container. So no ITAR, nothing, no like spacecraft hardware would ever get in to those locations. So what are the, all right, so give me the sketch of how you foresee this going, because that is, the point to point aspect there is very much all the things that you need to complete a mission and that you're able to develop out what you need for shipping something from a factory in space back to Earth the same way. But I feel like it is a more applicable market today because you don't rely on a factory existing first. So is that step one is getting that point-to-point shipping system in place?

And if so, what are the other parts that you have to develop? Like, is outposts, do you have a tug vehicle that is then pushing these shipping containers around? Is that dependent on having an upper stage that's able to deliver you on the trajectory that you need? And yours is inert until you hit the atmosphere. So the entire carrier vehicle is a spacecraft bus and the payload container, the shipping container. The spacecraft has the heat shield, which it deploys open. So we have those photos up.

But it's like a kind of like an upside down umbrella when it reenters the atmosphere. And but our spacecraft is entirely, um, self-contained. We get on orbit. We, we do all of our, um, orbital activities from our spacecraft. We have no, we're not using the upper stage booster at all for propulsion. Um, we reenter the atmosphere with our own propulsion system. And then, um, and then in the, uh, well, let me, I'll walk you through how this works specifically because it's kind of an interesting technique.

So remember the two things we want to solve, largest payload capacity possible, but also landing accuracy. So there's the problem with this is that when you reenter from space, any vehicle reentering, you have a very big dispersion on the ground or where you'll land. It can be thousands of kilometers across. and the way that that dispersion is shrunken down and down to we're talking like kilometers across right and why we do ocean splashdowns to put that kilometer radius in a safe area is we carry extra propulsion and on the way in the spacecraft is firing its thrusters and making itself get better and better on its way in and that narrows that uncertainty The issue is that fuel is very heavy.

And when we solve that problem that way, we're doing it at the expense of payload capacity. So a typical reentry vehicle at best has a 23, maybe 25 percent payload mass fraction, meaning the total vehicle that is payload divided by the total vehicle mass, 23, 25 percent. Cariel is going to hit 50 percent. So we're going to double that. But the second problem is you got to get down to that landing accuracy. So the way we do it is we deploy this heat shield.

And by the way, all the good ideas in space, somebody at NASA thought of a long time ago. It got ridden about it got tested. And the goal is you build the right partnership. So we have a great partnership with NASA and the folks who originated this type of heat shield. and we work with them to commercialize it and to take it kind of the next several steps forward. And so this heat shield deploys open. It's made of a carbon fiber fabric. It doesn't ablate on the way in.

It actually rejects heat through radiation. And the way it works is that very large surface area compared to the total mass of our vehicle allows us to come into the atmosphere much slower. So all of our orbital energy is retired in the upper atmosphere where the air is very thin. So we don't put a lot of aerothermal heating on the vehicle. We're used to seeing capsules and space planes that blast into the atmosphere. It's a big ball of fire. And that's because they're coming in so fast that they're experiencing aerothermal heating in the lower atmosphere.

They're losing all their orbital energy where the air is really thick. So we don't have to deal with that. we reject all of our heat through radiation and we transition to subsonic flight at about 65,000 feet. So that's like the U2 spy plane altitude. We are subsonic. And so you have all this altitude. And that's when we open our paraglider wing, which we just saw a photo of. So rather than using parachutes, we're using advanced paragliders that we've been developing here in this factory behind me.

and the wing is robotically flying the vehicle to a landing site. So instead of coming in really fast, opening parachutes at the last minute and crashing down, we're coming in slow, transitioning subsonic high, opening our paraglider so high up that we can then control its flight all the way to the landing target. And that's been allowing us to hit at our desert test site. we're consistently under 15 meters from our target. So we're now at like landing pad precision for an orbital vehicle. Yeah. And with parachutes, that's not nothing.

What's that? With parachutes, that's not nothing, right? Like that's pretty good for, for. Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, I would say like, I mean, you could compare this to one of our use cases is actually using that paraglider from airplanes. So it's a derivative product, but to do airdrop for the military. And their current systems that they do airdrop with with parachutes have accuracy of about 200 to 250 meters of accuracy.

So that's a huge distance compared to 10 to 15 meters. Yeah, yeah. You're throwing it back. Bring out the Gemini Rigala wing, baby. I love this thing. This was, and most people don't know about this, but when the Gemini program was flying, if you watch the right stuff, like, remember the astronauts were really upset, they were test pilots, they wanted to fly the capsule.

So this was the original design for Gemini was the capsule would come in, and then there was an engineer at NASA, his last name is Regalo, invented this deployable paraglider and the concept was that they would open up and the Gemini capsule would be piloted by the astronauts and interestingly that you know the technology of paragliders really was not far along back then and the idea after it went through some testing got scrapped so we've kind of resurfaced that concept with modern day materials the paragliders are made out of and now it's possible Did you ever go visit it at the Udvar Hazi? I have, I mean, I have a, now that this is live and it will be recorded, it's a perfect place to put this into the public record.

I have a discussion with the Air and Space Museum to put our vehicle right above that when we get it back. Yes. Which would be super cool because right behind where that photo is taken is space shuttle discovery. And that was a space shuttle I worked on in college. So if I had the Earth Return vehicle I worked on in college, the inspiration for outposts and then the outpost vehicle above it would be like completing your life circle. Yeah, you can just die at that point.

I don't want it. I don't think I'll do that, Jake. But maybe go take a vacation. Just hang out for a bit, you know. That's a fair alternative. I support that decision too. He's going to take the Apollo Airstream that's parked next to it and go on a road trip. It was so cool.

I think the Starliner bus is there too at some point. Not doing much else. Oh, man. Astrovan. What do you think is the, like when you think about Earth return, what gets you excited? You started this off saying that you had lots of ideas. Oh, yeah. I mean, we've been talking about this a lot among our listeners and stuff.

And the Starship is the obvious one of the like, you know, because they, one of the initial things they talked about was this whole point-to-point travel and being able to just like fly it like an airliner and go anywhere in the world in, you know, 45 minutes or whatever. And then, you know, started to think about that. It's just like, well, there could be some some really basic kind of drop shipping style ideas from that too. But most of them end up being military, right? And it's exactly that. It's like, how powerful would it be if you could just like drop an M1 Abrams tank into the middle of a hot zone, you know, like that you can't get to? And then like it's just game over. over, right? You know, and it's a big

enough vehicle that you could maybe support something like that. And so that was the joke was just dropping an M1 tank wherever you needed to get some stuff done, right? I don't know if that would fit in your container though. It'd be a little heavy. Yeah.

I mean, the container size is definitely big enough to put large vehicles. So. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, small drones are doing a pretty good job today. So probably just like a bunch of drones in one of these things would be a really good way The same thing is that I'm still on the M1 tank style warfare. Yeah, bro.

Get your ingenuity going, you know? Come on. Made street to groans now. So it's just, yeah. No, I mean, like, this is what the military calls the tyranny of distance is how for us to fight these far-flung conflicts, we are stuck with that distance problem. And it's why the U.S. military's budget, almost half of it is logistics. It's like just moving things into these places and maintaining those stockpiles and those warehouses on South Pacific Islands and things like that.

So the moment you have an ability to launch something from U.S. soil and get it somewhere else in 60 minutes completely changes the nature of military logistics. And what I would expect is that over time, it changes the nature of commercial logistics as launch costs comes down. So what I think happens is the warehouse, the distribution center will eventually start to co-locate near the launch sites. Because if you're 60 minutes to your customer from launch, why would you first drive something across the country to get to the launch? the launch pad. Yeah. Right.

The distribution. It starts. It starts to co-locate. And then eventually the factory start to co-locate because, you know, I think it's Toyota invented just in time manufacturing, which worked really well at kind of the factory level, but not at a global level. But if, again, if you can get things around the world this quickly, why hold inventory? Why try to estimate how much your market?

is going to buy something and build and then accidentally build more than enough, you might as well just start to bring back just in time manufacturing. So I think the factories start to co-locate near the launch site. I think that changes business in a lot of ways that we can't fathom yet. I don't think it's just, oh, you know, next day delivery is next hour delivery. I think it's going to be some really big changes across how a lot of the physical world makes things and moves things. But then eventually, if you want to get around the launch problem altogether, you don't want

to be relying on weather and launch availability. So you move the distribution center to orbit. So I think you have big, really big space stations and start to stockpile on orbit. And then, of course, you would then eventually move the factory there. and then you've completely decoupled from launch and you just have manufacturing on orbit, warehousing on orbit, and you just put things down when you need to.

That's the future. You're said too much. And then you've got to launch the containers back up, right? So you still do need to. Well, this is actually like you're also going to make to. You need to start moving supplies to these facilities so the containers become a delivery system for supplies in a return system for finished goods.

Yeah, yeah. Just like on Earth, right? You drive the truck there. You feel about it. Exactly. I was going to say, like, so that kind of gives you a decision you kind of have to make as a business is, do you want to own the shipping service and you make your own vehicles? Or do you just make the vehicles and sell them to other companies and then they're shipping, you know, just like containers?

They're just buying the containers. Are you UPS or are you selling the UPS? Man, that's a good question. It's one of these questions that like you, it's unclear yet how that plays out because both could be the opportunity. And where our mind goes is you want to try to just understand how to do the whole thing. And then perhaps start to partner here and there to make it happen faster. I can tell you less about logistics, but when you think about the optical fiber, it's one thing. to produce optical fiber in space or even on the ground. It's another thing to

jack at the fiber, put connectors on the fiber, build transceivers and receivers for the fiber, and repeaters for the fiber and turn it into something that actually is a usable product that goes into data centers or telecom or what have you. So it's clear there that as we build that next-gen fiber, we will need a consortium of partners to help turn it into the finished product. I think the same is probably true when you think about logistics is that there's legacy logistics players that are going to have a hand in this. And we're going to be probably finding ways to collaborate and make it all happen. Yeah, because if you are incorporating it into, you know, your full logistics system and, you know, they've got the last mile figured out, but they need

to the point to point part for the for the heavy lifting, right? It just makes sense to integrate into their existing system, right? But I don't know how much, you know, if a company like UPS starts to depend on this kind of orbital delivery system, they're not going to want to have that dependency be an external company, right? And at some point, too, if it scales to the level of your dreams, then you don't want to have to maintain this enormous warehouse in Florida where every shipping container is coming back to you and getting back on it. You know, then your job is like logistics of logistics, just moving the damn containers around Florida, right?

Yeah. Yeah, what shipping containers do your shipping container ship in? Even bigger ones. Bigger ones. Yeah. Space is so funny in this way, though, that like, there's something weird about space

that is different than all the transportation that has come before, where the margins are so slim and the use cases are so specific in the outset that we don't have as easy of a delineation as you had in the days where it made more sense for someone to be an airplane manufacturer and sell those to an airline. That is also integrated in the world of space,

and it's hard to excerpt that, but if the industry grows in the way that we all imagine, at some point that will be more extractable, hypothetically. But how you get from where we are now to there doesn't make sense to me at all, and I haven't heard anyone really paint the picture for how SpaceX goes from operating every starship that gets created to other people operating starships.

Not that that particular use case, again, that breaks down immediately because none of us can imagine that. But, you know, Boeing doesn't have an airline. They sell airplanes. Exactly. I can't figure out how that jump happens in space. How it happens. Yeah, I mean, your tech makes more sense in that because there,

but again, it falls down at the point of outpost operating that spacecraft bus that's taking this in and through space. and it makes more sense when a shipping container shows up at someone's yard and they're managing it just like every other shipping container that they manage that comes off a train but they're not also going to go reintegrate that on a launch vehicle and fly it through space

to their other facility that feels like a jump too far. I don't know. It's weird. I can't figure out what the far future of that is. I think it's what points to like the real reason that you feel that and you feel how weird it is

is it really just points. to how early we are in space. And like this is super early days. Like there, if you could jump forward 50 years, it's going to be so different. And in fact, that's why I even got into building outpost was, is I understood how early days it still is and how there's still room to build generational space companies. Like things that build on top of. of launch and on top of what SpaceX created, but to build something that, you know,

100 years from now, there are going to be household names that are space companies, like the GEs of space, and those companies are now getting created. But I think that that's, I think part of the uncomfortableness of it, Anthony, is like what you're feeling is

you can't even compare this to terrestrial industries yet because, like, the economies of scale aren't there and the wider demand isn't there. So we build these companies based on maybe more niche kind of activities. And I think the companies that will win are the ones who built around a niche product, but it was easily a scalable infrastructure and a scalable solution. So we can go build a system that's really good for flying to space and back of making optical fibers. But if we nail that, it's going to be the infrastructure layer that then kind of scales in,

like all we have to do is make thousands of these vehicles. and all of a sudden, we've introduced a new logistics paradigm. There's even more niche stuff, too, than that, where, you know, your vehicle, your concept operations is a more easy way to think about returning large one-off items that we didn't think that necessarily needed to be returned, like a giant piece of the ISS that needs to be repaired on the ground and sent back up. Or, you know, there was a moment in time where we couldn't fit the spacesuits through the docking ports that we had available. on Space Station until we figured out how to take them apart effectively.

Like put them all on one of these, ship them back down. Maybe you read my tweets. I don't know. But yeah, public service announcement of the day is we should definitely not burn up the whole space station. We should bring a module home. So like you could take our block three carry all, the big one that does a shipping container and fly it without the container and just get it to the space station, adapt and make a module and return it. And I don't, I feel like it's a, it's definitely a worthy endeavor because

we're spending a lot of money already to deorbit the station. And it would be a pretty small amount of additional funding to try this. And if it doesn't work, like there's no harm, no foul, like we were about to burn the whole thing up anyway. And if it does work, then there's a really important artifact that was built on taxpayer dollars that we get to keep in a museum forever. So. And you would do it for about a billion and a half dollars, probably. But wouldn't it be such a shame to lose the whole station when we didn't, when we could have tried to not lose it? Yeah. And Hubble, too. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I wanted to go the other way

on Hubble, Jake. Come on. Going up, not down. We'll see. We'll see. Like an Viking funeral type thing. Release the Hubble files. All right. So when you look around the market and, you know, we talked about how there's a lot of different

shapes of this, a lot of different use cases, what are the, who are the players that feel the most close to outposts that you would be losing sleep over? what things feel like not your territory, right? How does Starfall fit into this? Like, SpaceX is being secretive about it in a way that is interesting. Do you look at Starfall more, or do you think about Starship returning payloads more as a competitor to Outpost? The thing that I'm worried about the most is not any U.S. company, but it's actually that China develops all of the technologies that all the different Earth return companies are building, and they do it faster. And I think that puts the Western world in a really precarious position.

So I believe that everybody needs to exist in the U.S. I think every one of these earth return companies, back to my like, there's lots of different types of airplane analogy. I really truly believe they all should exist and they should get crap tons of funding behind them to exist as quickly as possible. because by the way, I don't, I think we have a quality of standard in how our military operates and how the quality of our technologies before we deploy them into the field. I can't say that that's the case with the adversaries.

So they might move faster on things that are less developed at lower maturity. So we need to accelerate. That said, I think that the place that we focus the most is on. obviously large capacity return. So 1,000 kilogram or higher type payloads are, you know, really the sweet spot for what we're building. We're moving towards 10,000 kilograms. Starfall is in that lower, the lower category.

It's an interesting payload volume. You know, the whole thing's designed to come out the PEZ dispenser on a starship. So it's very volumetrically constrained. So I'm not that, like I actually think Starfall is probably one of the best. indicators that what outpost is building is valuable. If you look at it, first off, they went after a low beta decelerator heat shield, a large surface area heat shield like what we have. You can't really point to any other Earth return company besides outpost working on low beta

decelerators, which kind of exemplifies what it does. It slows you down quickly in the upper atmosphere. Starship is clearly a large down, like one starship can, return more mass than one carry-all. However, Starship is returning mostly empty, just like other re-entry vehicles of that type, like of lifting bodies and high ballistic coefficient reentries. You're returning mostly empty because you have a CG issue where if you were mostly full, you would burn up. So if you were to launch a starship full of carry-alls

and bring the carry-alls down full of their payload, you would get over two times the mass returned than if you just launched the cargo in a starship and returned a starship. So if you could fit out the door. Right. That's the problem. You've got a door problem in front of you on the starship front.

Huge, like, I mean, SpaceX will eventually create Podbay doors for Starship, otherwise they're going to lose out on a huge part of the market. Open the Podve doors, Elon. Barely open the cell shirts, Grock. Build some pod bay doors, Elon. That's not stressing you out, though, right? Man, the third good one. We had Earth.

Earth quality. We had, where's the toilet paper come from? Build the pot bay doors, Elon. Okay. The mass math is very interesting, though. Yeah. Yeah, that's a thing that I would not have assumed it's a 2X benefit in your favor. Yeah.

I mean, it might be more. It might be more than that. But I think the initial starships are probably going to return almost completely empty for that reason. So, you know, the biggest, the companies like SpaceX are always going to have more cash to throw out the problems than a company like Outpost. And so we can't out-compete in terms of who has more capital to go out-the-problem. But we can out-compete on how innovative we are and how we think of solutions that are a little bit different. than what's been tried before. And so that's where we win.

And, you know, but again, like, we, Starship is like a very good companion to what we're building. If Starship is wildly successful and Elon builds those pod bay doors, then point-to-point logistics commercially happens. And I think that if they can do what they're saying and they can. get to the price points that they're talking about with Starship, we're only about a decade away from the cost of moving things around the world through space on a carry-all being at the same price as air freight today. So if like the second half of the 2030s, we've got space freight at the price of air freight, that is like, I mean like pre-2040 the world is different, right?

So we should all hope that Starship does all those things and that SpaceX is able to make that happen. And then I think the other return companies are going to be successful in their own right in small-scale return for exquisite payloads like we talked about earlier for the military. The Starship Return problem is still the fact that you're returning a whole Starship with it and you need space for a lot of fire and 30 of the most. or I guess six or nine of the most advanced engines that we have on Earth. Like that is an insurmountable problem in many environments that outpost lands more gracefully in. It's like the whole system is a heavy mechanical aerodynamic body, right? And we have a heat shield made of fabric and we have a paraglider wing made of fabric. So what we've done is we've light-weighted our entire entry to send-and-landing system

to be a very small percentage of the total mass. And then we've utilized a reentry technology that protects the vehicle without, there's literally no backshell. Like a capsule has a backshell. We just have a big surface area and the cone from reentry protects our vehicle behind it. So we've developed a solution

that just doesn't have mass where everything else does. And, you know, dollars per kilogram, That's the name of the game. So you've got to figure out a system that has as many kilograms being dollar making as possible to get the cost down. Yeah, yeah. You have a really good troll opportunity as well to make one of your first test payloads, B-E-4s that Blue Origin isn't using anymore and just troll ULA with a nice return of engines from a test. So I'd like to put that into the universe to see.

You guys are hot. I see what this was all about here. These are our ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want attention-grabbing demo missions? Yes. There we go.

There we go. Tori Brinem might tell you a couple B-4s now to do that. He might also be in on the troll. It might be a good idea. I mean, it's a little bit different. Like, yes, we brought one back. It technically wasn't like used. And then it just was there.

That doesn't matter for the tweet. I'm thinking of. Exactly. It's pretty smart. It's a smart idea. Yep. Thanks. Well, Jake.

Can you give us some, like a look ahead to what are some upcoming launches or missions that we can be excited about? Yeah. So we are, we're pretty heads down right now. Our first orbital reentry mission is in the quarter one of 2028, which in most worlds is a far time away in the space world. tomorrow. So we're moving pretty quickly through the build of the first set of vehicles and the qualification of them. The next several months and maybe next six to nine months is a huge amount of test flights of our reentry system. So we do like airdrop testing of this paraglider system and the control system of it. So what we, you know, we, you know, we,

you can stay tuned for is what we keep putting out content of those flights on our socials. And you're definitely going to see a lot more really interesting things that have been happening over the last several months there. But we've now developed a system that is by far the best precision landing system from space, but it's also going to be critically important for airdrop out of aircraft for the military. And yeah, and you might you might start to hear some things pretty soon about our space factory side of the house. I'll not assume we're going to bring that out, but it's happening. Love it. That's rad. I can't wait. I'm a big space factory. I'm pro space factory. Let's do it. I just want to play more factorial.

Jake loves that game. Is that what it's called? Factorial? Vactorial, yeah. Yeah. If you need a logistics manager, I think. I think Jake's probably trained up on that. Yeah. You got it. We all figured out. Well, thanks so much, man. We'll be at the Smithsonian when you are hanging your first returned container up as well.

I'll be there. It'll be great. It'll be great event. Next to you are. Mm-hmm. We returned it to figure out what the leak was about. Yeah. Okay, yeah, mark your calendars.

We'll, we can do like another live podcast underneath the vehicle. Let's do it. Jake, I think you book some gecks next week, right? I think I did too. And, yeah, and I have to. Icarus robotics is on the list here. Yeah, yeah, we're going to do some. Well, I'm so excited about it because robots are cool.

but I got to admit that they're moving into some Canada arm space here. So I might have to get my elbows up a little bit. We'll see what's going on here in terms of that. I have no idea what's going on here. Was I on this email thread? I had no idea there was anything. No, okay. This is a total surprise to me.

Yeah, so Jamie and Ethan from Icarus robotics. They were doing like AI powered like autonomous robots in space and stuff. So we'll talk about that. And you're getting nervous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, that's my turf, man.

That's your market. Right. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes And maybe they'll be Putting outpost containers together at some point We'll see Nice

All right y'all Well thanks again Jason for hanging out It was awesome hanging out with you Thanks Thanks for having me guys See y'all Bye See everybody

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