Off-Nominal - 259 - Overhead (with Chris Kemp)

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Astra founder and CEO Chris Kemp to talk about the company’s road back from the brink, Rocket 4, and why he still sees a path for it today.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 259 - Overhead (with Chris Kemp) - YouTubeAstra Rocket 4.0 | Private Space Launch CompanyAstra is Poised to Rewrite the 'Commercial' Rocket Equation with its 2027 Rocket 4 Launch - The DebriefAstra Launches NASA's ELaNa 41 Mission - YouTubeFollow ChrisChris Kemp (@Kemp) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Go at throttle up. Negative return. Hello, Jake. It's here. It's Thursday, baby. It's been a big week. It's been a big week.

It's actually been a terrible week in my area of the country. The Philadelphia sports teams are not making us happy in this area, so we're having a rough week over here, Jake. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, this is the highlight of my week, for sure. So, how you doing down there? doing good. How's Chris doing? We got Chris Kemp here with us today from Astros. We've got, it's been a great week, guys. We have a Falcon 9 launch. We're watching over here where we've got a whole bunch of our engines on a bunch of satellites. Obviously, Starship this week. Huge,

huge success. Jake's favorite rocket Falcon 9 tonight, or Falcon Heavy, I mean, Jake's a big noted Falcon Heavy fan. I love Falcon Heavy. You sure do. Yeah. Good Rocket Week. We got a rocket in the background. Got some rockets. Let's cook him back there. You can't see Rocket for it, but it's over there. And it's kind of on the, in the lane, the integration lane on the way out the door. But it's pretty cool to be looking at.

That's exciting. You don't get to see it, though. We just get the, is that an old static display of the three? This is actually, this was a Rocket 3. We cut it so that you kind of see inside the faring and everything. And we sent one to the Shabot-Smithsonian, museum up in the Berkeley Hills, which they put vertically, is the fastest and least expensive rocket to ever make orbit. And we took one of the ones that was set up for the tropics mission

that we didn't launch, and we just cut it up and set it here as a museum piece. I love a good cutout display. There was a good, remember at IAC? Jake, there was that RL10 that had like the cutaways. I love a good cutaway. You might not remember that. Yeah. Cutaways are good displays. Love them. That's awesome. We have an absolute load of topics to talk about Jake. Yeah. But did you make a mead? What do you get? What do you drink it down there? What do you got? I got some real simple today. I just got a little bit of a little tamarindic cocktail. So one of my favorite little aqua fresco is down here in Mexico. So with just a little splash

of something in it, you know, just to give it some spice and yeah, it's good to go. It's pretty dark. It's good and a hot day. What do you got out west, Chris? we have Red Bull. This is the official breakfast of champions out here. Are you going to paint the Rocket 4 like that as well? Is that the paint scheme? I've been thinking a lot about things you can do to increase revenue per launch that don't involve a lot of mass.

And honestly, this is a pretty cool paint because you get a lot of the raw aluminum color here. So if anybody out there is from Red Bull, we could do a little brand sponsorship and just make the rocket look literally like a Red Bull can with a little nose cone. This is like bringing us back to the pizza hot rocket, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's a commercial launch company. Let's just go all in. You know, we could make like Formula One. Let's just put brand sponsors. We could have the we could have the Omega countdown clock. We could have the. It's amazing that that hasn't happened yet, honestly. Like, I think we're seriously looking at it.

Like I'd love to, I'd love to, you know, anything that we can do that allows our customers to have a less expensive launch, you know, so why not? I mean, is this, to find a more 90s shock, yes, Jake. That is perfect. Incredible. So, yeah, Red Bull. Nice. I got a, I got a dirt wolf double IPA. We can, that's, this is a little more involved, uh, of a paint scheme. This will not be going on to rocket four. There's a lot going on pretty cool in that thing. So yeah, we're going, we're going high content, 8.7, Jake, for 8.7 for the Asthma

conversation. Yeah, you know. Should we start on current status, Chris? It's been a journey to Rocket 4, but, and I feel like I saw some, you know, you were somewhere a week or two ago talking about where things are at with Rocket 4,

but I feel like we need to start with where are things at. Yeah, we're working to get a date mailed down at wallups to do a launch that'll be a test flight. And then we have a space force flight, STP 27, Bravo, in Q2. And then we have another two flights, one for DIU, one for a commercial customer in Q3. And so we're trying to hit a quarterly cadence next year. And then things go well. And we have, you know, we have a bunch of successful flights next year. We could see that going to two to three flights per quarter. And if we continue to want to fly and iterate, we'll keep it

at one a quarter in 2028. But there's an enormous amount of demand right now. So the real challenge we have is there's far more interest in launches than we're able to deliver on. And what we want to do is just have the discipline to launch, look at all the data, take the time to make whatever changes we want in the first few flights. So we're not going to go faster than that. We're going to, we're going to, you know, just take our time and do it right. And ultimately, it's the area under the curve over the next few years. It's not the attempt to kind of go really fast and then have a, have a couple of failures and slow it down. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the demand is like such an interesting question right now because there's like, even in just in the last couple months,

things have changed on that, that whole question because you've got, I think like smaller rocket launch has always been kind of an open question. There's people saying there's always, you know, there's always someone that needs that bespoke trajectory. And then there's a people saying like, no, everything is just getting sucked up by transporter. So like there's just no, there's no reason to have a small rocket. But then now transporter is rumored to be going away. And so it's like, oh, are we back, baby? Are we so back? And then it's like, but then you have like other companies that are still abandoning small rockets. So I'm, I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about the demand curve and just the market for

for what four can do, right? Yeah, I think you've got to look at what, I like to look at things in the extremes. Let's say SpaceX were to have a starship that just took all these satellites up to space for free for a second. It's kind of like a container ship, right? I mean, I can go put a bunch of stuff in a container ship, and I can get it through the Suez Canal, and I can get it to New York, and I can pay .0000001 cents a kilogram or something like that. However, I don't do that. I tend to FedEx things if I need to get stuff places.

You know, I tend to have a car or get in an Uber. I don't tend to take a bus because it turns out, you know, people's time is valuable. And if you're a satellite, your time is really valuable. So if your satellite has to wait a year, even if it's free to get into orbit, if you have to spend months, you know, you're generally using one of our propulsion systems. But so we're going to make money either way. but it's better if you get exactly where you want to go as fast as possible. So you start generating revenue from your satellite as fast as possible.

And there's a real cost to a satellite being in orbit, but not being in the operational orbit or the operational altitude where it's able to generate revenue for the customer. So I think that's the way I look at it. I think Astor exists even if SpaceX makes space access free. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because if you think about it that way, it's almost like the market's often,

Cass is like small launch and like large launch. Like there's two as if, but it's almost like that small launch is kind of the middle market. And then there's there's like a discount launch below that right. And that's like the customer that they're just cash strapped. They cannot like there's getting a bespoke launch is just out of the question for them. The only option on their their books is to be like, I just got to wait for the cheapest right. I got to wait for the bus, right? That's the only thing I get for I'm taking the bus. It's fine. And then there's this middle customer that's like, Oh, no, I'm big enough that I can afford my own ride and get the right thing. I'm not the DOD or anything.

I'm not going to bulk buy a bunch of Falcon Nines or whatever, but I still need that kind of like middle tranche of people, right? It's almost, I don't know, I feel like that's not talked about a lot, but it's kind of, I feel like that's kind of shaking out as to what's really looking there. Yeah. Well, I think there's two things. People like to talk about price per kilogram or, you know, dollars per kilogram. I think it's also dollars per launch.

And if you look at a Starship or a Falcon 9, Falcon 9, Falcon 9s, we're being sold for, you know, $60, $70 million commercially per launch, we're selling launches for five. And, you know, if we're throwing $6,700 initially up to 1,000 kilograms, well, that's very competitive. I mean, you look at what the ride share costs are. Our goal is to have a dedicated launch that on a per kilogram basis is comparable to what's being offered by the larger rockets. But on a per launch basis, I mean, we're 20 times cheaper. Yes. And if you've got a satellite, you know, the problem with rocket three, frankly, is it was too small.

You know, we had a maximum maybe 100 kilograms of payload capacity on that vehicle. You can see it behind me. You know, it's a microwave oven, you know, cluster of satellites. And it was just too small. I mean, we saw Amazon with the Leo constellation pushing 500 kilograms. We saw the SDA satellites pushing 500 kilograms. I mean, 500 kilograms was basically the addressable market for a lot of these larger constellations. You look at planets, pelicans, and tanagers, you look at zonas.

I mean, there's apex's buses. There's just everything is falling in this kind of call it three to 500 kilogram range. And so when you start to look at being able to maybe fly one or two of those, the price point has to be $5 million. If you're competing with putting 20 of them on a rocket that costs between 50 and $100 million. So it's always economics. And that's how we've always looked at it. It's what is the launch cost for us to operate and what can we sell it for and what's the margin? And customers look at it the same way.

What am I paying per satellite to launch my satellite? And if it doesn't make sense, they're not going to buy your launch. You're speaking my language because I have this like, I have a pet peeve with dollars per kilogram. I think we talk about it way too much. I think it's like it's a useful metric if you're like trying to be like, here's what Falcon 9 cost in 2015 and here's what it costs today. and you can go, okay, the price per kilogram is changed. Okay, that gives you like a useful comparison. But like, yeah, I don't think you don't go roll up to like SpaceX and be like, well,

my, what's your price per kilogram? Okay, so I multiply that by how many kilograms my satellite is. Not so much it's not how it works at all, right? No one prices that way unless you get into like really, really fine grade stuff. And I don't think we don't have any rockets like that are big enough to do that yet. So, yeah. Pet peeve. So you can we go back a sec to rocket, your rocket three comparison there in payload?

You said it was the problem. is it, it seems to me it was a problem of Rocket 3. I mean, I think you, what I want to ask you about that is like, how do you, how do you take what did not work with Rocket 3 and what are you changing on Rocket 4 to put yourself in a position where people are doing the economic calculus of like,

is this word? I think you look at, you know, and I have a friend who's compiled every new rocket program and the history of rocket programs from every, every nation, every team that's ever done it. And,

I mean, we all look at companies like SpaceX. I mean, ship 14 made it orbit. They've had a number of iterations. And that is an approach that arguably gets you there faster because as much as you do design and analysis, I mean, there are companies that spent decades designing and analyzing things and they have a launch and it works and they have a launch and it doesn't work. You know, you look at, you look at Astros approach with the rocket 3, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0.

We flew our first rocket 18 months after we, in question. incorporated the company, and we were two guys in a garage, right? So this was by far the fastest launch. Now, the thing flew for 30 seconds, blew up, and they made a movie about it, right? So, I mean, but we learned a lot from that flight, and then we did it again and again, and we were the fastest team in human history to make orbit, and then we did it again. But the problem is, yeah, we did it, and it worked, and it worked, and it didn't work, and it didn't work. Could we have continued to iterate and press? We root cause that issue. We certainly could have made Rocket 3 reliable, but the point was it didn't make sense.

The market had moved on to larger payload classes. And I think a lot of companies moved on, they said we're going to make really big, reusable rockets. And we decided not to do that. We decided to focus on the mobility of the system. So we could have a mobile spaceport that we could transport mass produce, just like we mass produce the rockets. And we like the shipping container format because we could transport the rockets anywhere in the world. We could stockpile them. Let's focus on the overall economics of launch, not focusing on,

you know, a reusability or the, you know, making a giant rocket. You know, the world has lots of giant rockets and there's a lot of people working on reusability. What the world does not have is anyone that's really focused on a system where, I mean, you know, there's 32 NATO countries. You know, there's three of them that have rockets. That is, that is like 30 countries that we could provide sovereign launch access to. Quite simply. Some of them have geography problems, but, yeah. Well, but sure, but I mean, they all have places, islands and things where they could launch from where they control the system. So I think Astros got this unique opportunity as the president talks about

a thousand launches a year as we talk about American, you know, space supremacy. How are we going to do that if we have to go do things that are really hard to do from an ITAR standpoint in other countries? And I look at the aviation, what happened with civil aviation in the 20th century, in 19th century, and I say, what could we do in the 21st and 22nd century with rockets? You know, if America leans into this and we, we're able to share with all of our allies and all of our friends across the world access to space, it'll start with an astro type system where it's easy to manufacture and then ship and transport and

set up and operate. You know, the international airport start out as dirt airfields. And all we need is a dirt, you know, pad, you know, or concrete pad and we can launch a rocket. So I think it's how, if you believe in space and you believe in every sovereign nation having access to it, then I think there's a really big role for Astra to play here. The sovereign question is interesting because I feel like the, we've heard that before. I think that was, you know, Virgin Galactic kind of had that idea as well because it's like they can, you know, just take off from a runway. And so you instantly have all your space ports and all these, all these countries that don't have astronaut programs. Get theoretically have astronaut programs right on their doorstep, right?

I feel like the rug got pulled under that argument in the last couple of years, though, because the, just purely from a geopolitic standpoint, you know, America's. Speaking as a Canadian, Jake, yes, you are. Speaking, yeah, as a Canadian, I can say. You gotta watch out, Chris. You gotta watch out with this guy. Like, the American relationship with, especially with NATO countries, especially has been very, it's had some challenges this year.

And a lot of the discussion happening in countries like mine, other countries is like, how can we do this without relying on anything to do with the United States, right? And so do you feel like that tension when you're looking at those markets and things like that? Because that would be a really, I would love to be in the boardroom when you guys are talking about. Well, Jake, you also have a launch site that's under works that would be a, spot where Ashtra could launch in the future. So this is a very pointed question.

Well, and we're in active discussions with them. I mean, and I, because there are so many countries that say, well, we'll build a spaceport, but for what rocket, right? And also, are you really going to invest an enormous amount of capital for a launch pad for a specific rocket? I mean, what's, there isn't demand for that in any country. So our ability to literally require nothing of a, of a sovereign nation other than a concrete pad. And then, you know, that that is incredible. And we already have, with five different countries, TAAs to do launches. So we'd go to Sweden, we could go to Norway, we'd go to the UK, we can do launches. Australia. What we can't do right now is we can't sell the entire system to our allies like we can with Patriot missiles, like we can with, you know,

fighter jets, like we can with other critical technology. Now, why not? You know, would we prefer that these countries build their own rockets, go to China, go to Russia, because that's the option that we have. And so I actually think there's an opportunity to use space and rockets as a diplomatic fig leave to our allies and to say, hey, let's do something together. We did it with the space station for many decades with the USSR and Russia. Let's do it with rockets. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I want. Hopefully we can get us on the hunt for some rockets. like, I'll take it.

Yeah, yeah. I would love to see a launch from Nova Scotia. That'd be great. How do you feel on the payload size, like when you determine that Rocket 3 was the wrong size, how did you determine that Rocket 4 is the right size? Because I think is Asthma currently the only of these small launch companies that is not working on a bigger rocket?

Because Firefly's got their bigger thing. Rocket Labs got Neutron. Everybody's moving out. I think, you know, this is just me, but, you know, rockets are really hard. and very few companies figure out one rocket, let alone two that they're trying to execute on simultaneously, right? So when another country, when a company raises a bunch of money and says, great, we're going to start working on a big rocket in addition to our small rocket, a little part of me, there's a little smile on my face because it's, I know what that, I know how challenging that's going to be internally, right, for them and how much risk that adds to the program. So, yeah, we are laser focused. I care about nothing other than a successful flight of rocket four, Q1 in next year,

and then to have another one and another one, and to just, if I've learned anything, it's, you know, you've got to assume that something almost didn't work and study all the data and try to find, you know, anything that you've missed. I don't want any distractions. I don't want anybody thinking about a larger rocket. I don't want anybody thinking about lunar landers. I don't want anybody thinking about building satellites for the DOD for, for $200 million each.

I mean, that, frankly, that is a, might be a good short-term optimization, but the demand for launch right now, if we can operate a one-ton class vehicle that I can transport to every country on Earth for $5 million a launch is, you know, unlimited effectively at this point. So we just need to focus, do it.

You know, I like to say, if you look at the five companies right now, commercial companies in the U.S. that are operating launches, SpaceX has done, I think they just celebrated over six, 700 launches of Falcon 9, if I recall correctly. Sounds about right. Yeah.

You know, by far number one, number two is Rocket Lab. They've done over 70. And then you've got Astra, Blue Origin, and Firefly. And if you just count successful orbital flights, we've all, I think, done seven. So it's 770, 700. So there's an order of magnitude difference between... We're skipping you all right, which I appreciate about this conversation. Well, yeah, because it's not a commercial, you know, it's a highly subsidized.

good rockets. But yeah, I feel. I feel you. Fair enough. I get the point. The five is, your five is correct. That doesn't change the numbers much. No, it doesn't. I think it inserts, yeah, a number three competitor there. They just slot into the electron order of magnitude. If you go, and if you go by years, it really doesn't add anything. So, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So. So when you, when you look at that, though, right, like in your framework there of ULA being a different thing, do you also then, do you look at the others and try to classify them into certain roles or things and find like a hole in the middle there that you could optimize for? Well, and you know, the question that you asked, which I, which I didn't answer, but I will, is, you know, why is this the right mess? And it has everything

to do with the amount of rocket you can fit in a shipping container. That is our constraint. Because if you can put the rockets in shipping containers. It's like a different payload fraction calculation that you're doing. It's a way to think about it. But it's a very real thing. That means. I can transport them on C-17s, which we've done. We can do trains. We can do container ships. We can do trucks. We can put rockets in ports where you don't even know their rockets. And they can hide in plain sight. In fact, the entire spaceport that we build, it's in shipping containers and unpackes out of shipping containers. So you could have dozens of locations where you could conduct orbital launches across the United States in our, you know, allied countries.

And you wouldn't even know they're there. And you could pull out a rocket and then do orbital launch us the next day. That is a very important national security opportunity. If the adversary does not know where you can launch from, we could have a hundred of these things or we could have 10 of these things. It's like Star Wars 2.0. It's the ability for America to have access to space from wherever, whenever we want. And that's not something that you have from the three operational space ports we have in this country right now. You know, you can see a starship launch literally from the naked eye from space. And, you know, you've got wallops and you got Cape Canaveral and Van derbyrd. You've done. So, you know, I think it's the, it's the payload

that you can put into a rocket that can fit in a shipping container. And we're just going to optimize and optimize and optimize until there is as little rocket as possible with the fuel and payload. Fuel and payload in a shipping container with, you know, engineering as much rocket out of that equation in the rocket equation. Just make the rocket out of the shipping container. put the engine on the back. Okay, so you're a description there. Number one, I find the most motivating sales pitch you can give me about Astra on the current day.

Number two, sounds a lot more like a ULA pitch than any of the other companies that you listed. Like, that sounds like more like you're in that market. Where are we going? And I legitimately want to say this. Like, that is a, I do find that optimizing for that market is a legitimate thing that we can do. Like, I don't throw shade on that in the way

that I think other people would. I do think that's a motivating instance. But that does sound more specifically built for that than optimized for the economics of, you know, a synthetic aperture radar constellation or something. But I think that if we're focused on, I'm not being told to build this by the government, by some government contract. I'm building it, and I know they'll come. I know that if we have Golden Dome, Iron Dome for America, target practice opportunities, you're not going to want to shoot down a starship. You're not going to want to shoot down any of our competitors' rockets because, A, they're really big and they're carbon fiber. and they don't look anything like North Korea and ICBMs.

I can go set up in Greenland, and I can start launching rockets that are literally almost identical to what North Korea would send our way. And we can test all of the really expensive missile defense systems that we're developing as a country. We can show our adversaries that this stuff works. So we're the perfect target practice. We're like clay pigeons, right?

And so, yeah, that's great, because now I want to make the rocket as cheap as possible. Also, that's what my commercial customers want. Also, I want mobility. I think we've been doing this for long enough to know that there are opportunities that are significant. It's like SpaceX figured out, let's put Dragon, let's put cargo on the space station before we put people on Dragon. Super smart. So I think target practice is great.

I think satellites are great. We're not putting people on our rockets. I think there's going to be a real desire for a lot of our competitors to want to put people on stuff. And that just, it's a whole other level of mission assurance and cost. that we when you start putting people on these things. So, you know, I like what we are. Chris, the 2020, 2020, 2030's version of the Apollo Soyuz test mission is, is an astrocket and a rocket lab haste being target practice for each other and having to debate which

one's the target and which one's the attacker. Like that is the true, who is it, Tom Stafford? I forget who the cosmonaut was. I think, you know, rocket lab will have the haste thing and then, you know. I'm just telling you. That's the commercial space version of the Apollo. a Soyuz test program. And then we can get a part to a movie out of it.

I think that would be pretty entertaining for folks. I'm thinking about these shipping containers. You know how sometimes you hear about a shipping container, you know, one of the boats that has them all on there. It gets in a bad storm and they all fall off into the ocean. It's like, oh, yeah, 300 Honda Civic sunk to the bottom of the Pacific or whatever it was. And I'm imagining, well, we lost a couple of hundreds of wars. There was a bad storm near the French Polynesia.

with you. So how many in that model though, Chris, how many other, like give me your shipping container count there,

right? You've got one that's rocket and then you've got, based on the site, there was like another one or two that would be

launch ops. Is that the structure? Yeah, the way it works is the launcher goes in a container, which is the thing you attach to the rocket

that has the pad, the thrust deflector, the, the tell. Then you have a container which has all the fuel side systems, regulation,

and then oxide systems. And then in those systems, we have nitrogen supplies and other servers and things. So it's a container for fuel, a container for locks. And then all of the bulk fuel can either be supplied by the site.

You know, if it's an actual spaceport, a lot of those guys have locks things. Or we have ISO containers where you can bring the fuel and the locks right there and just set it, you know, set it next to those other containers. And so it's all containerized. We need nothing.

that doesn't come in a shipping container. And the con-offs right now is down to 24 hours. So we can go from arriving at a site to having an operational spaceport in 24 hours. And then we do a launch, and we can do another launch next day. I think within four hours or something, it's pretty quick turn.

So I've had so much fuel you had on the shipping container. You run out after a certain point. You don't need 15,000 trucks, though, to drive to your launch site in the way that Starbase. needs at the moment. Yeah, even Virgin Orbit, you know, if you looked at some of their launches,

I mean, they had a number of shipping containers that had to be there as support equipment in addition to the plane. So, you know, I think we've really tried to be very, how would you operate this in the field if you had like three people? So the goal is at the spaceport to have less than five people. Could be able to construct the entire con-ops on the field. And then we have in Mission Control 4. So, and that's less than 10 people can conduct a full orbital launch campaign.

Half of those in the field, half of them back in mission control. Now I'm curious of what other teams look like. Like, what does a Falcon 9 team look like? We've seen. They're just on our big screen. There's a lot of people. Yeah. You know, in mission control.

They're just currently forgotten about it, SpaceX, Jake. They're like, oh, yeah. They're in that room still. They're just always in there. They live in there. Speaking of the team, that's a question I wanted to ask you, Chris, in the post-resurrection era here, the taking the company private era. How does the team compare, both in size and makeup in that prior era and then where you're at now? I think there's been two big factors that have affected the team.

And the team is why I'm still here, frankly. I mean, and our customers. If I didn't have customers that continued to buy products from us, and I didn't have a team that was fully committed to the mission and to deliver whether it's satellite engines or launches for these customers, all the core people are here. You know, the guy that was here since the very beginning working on propulsion, Mike Chudson, I just saw him walk by.

He's still here working on the rocket engine. Adam London, my co-founder, just walked by. We brought some new incredible people. Al Weston came to join. us to lead the launch program. He worked with me at NASA and worked on a lot of the Star Wars program during the SDI era at the Air Force. And then he came to NASA.

He did the Ladi mission. He did El Cross, Kepler. And then he worked for Sergey Brin for about a decade on a really cool project. If you've seen the airship flying around the Bay Area here. Oh, yeah. And then the CEO of LTA. Nice. Very cool.

And then so he came. And, you know, avionics teams, like we, not a single team lost their core engineering expertise. So there was continuity throughout the entire company. We have just under 150 people today. And the number has never been less than just under 150 people. So the company always, we did get up to, you know, maybe 350 at the peak when we were working on all sorts of things. And a lot of those were accountants. you know, frankly. And, you know, being a public company, there's a lot of overhead. In fact,

right over me, we have a big maybe 50,000 square foot space that I literally took all the people that were not engineers and I moved them up there and I called them overhead. And that offended and that space is currently empty. So, you know, and I think what's really transformed the business, frankly, over the last year is AI where, you know, I've been able to really focus all of our resources on incredible engineers, technicians, machinists, folks that are actually designing and building hardware. And the rest of the business is being largely run through agents and AI that we've built. Oh, don't tempt me a fake. Don't tempt us. Knowledge work in shambles, yeah. It's an interesting transformation.

Calling it overhead is, have you watched Severance on Apple TV? I feel like. That's a very severancey department. Things to say. Well, when you literally put them overhead, you call them overhead. It's killer. It's great. It was, uh, yeah.

If you haven't watched severance, though, you should watch severance. It's absolutely worth it. I'll see if I can find that. It's excellent. I'm distracted, Jake. Don't ask about AI. Don't ask about AI. Don't ask you by AI.

No, we probably should actually, honestly, though. Honestly, I was, I was going to. Yeah, I'm curious to know, like, We're going to soft for developers by trade, Chris. So we are whatever pulled that is that we are like, I can go there. More so than a lot of our listeners were like way, way down that rabbit hole. Open my laptop here. I mean, I honestly, I like to say that I spend about 10 hours a day, you know, being a CEO, you know, talking to customers, investors, leading the company, spend 10 hours a day writing code.

And then I spend, you know, four hours a day sleeping. and I have found that one of the most incredible things, pieces of leverage we have is if you're a founder and you're running a company, you used to have to hire a lot of people that would buy software and configure software and manage software. And software had all these different, you know, you had your finance people had their ERP systems. Your engineering people had their PLM systems. And so Astro was using Siemens for their PLM systems. and we were using Microsoft and other enterprise software systems. These are all silos, right? And companies became like integration layers between these different software systems.

And I'll say this, and I'm quite serious about this, we will use no third-party software by the end of this year. We're replacing it all. You don't have to convince us to. Like, way in on that. I don't think other people realize the moment that we're in in owning your own stack and maintaining that. building just what you need and not having 80% of the features that you don't use and what

that's going to change internally. Does that also then encounter flight software avionics and that stack as well? Are you purely talking about this internal? Yeah. I'm talking everything. I mean, we've always done our own avionics and flight software stacks and electronics and everything. That's all, that's all been in-house. But what I mean is I mean everything. Like I currently, I don't use Outlook anymore. I use an email client that we wrote internally. We use our own models. We have an AI stuff. That one's a little far. I feel like, mail.

You've losing me on the mail. I'm like, just write an email. It's like, it's just annoying. I mean, like if I want to, if I, if I, if I get an email from someone and I want to enrich it with either an AI, you know, reviewing some attachments or some content or if I want to put, you know, embedded content in the message, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail. I mean, this stuff is, it's not, it's not, it's just, you know, it's just another system you have to integrate with that creates a, you know, if you've got a billion people that use

Gmail. Well, Astra uses messaging in its own way, and to be able to tame that experience for our employees is incredible. Anyway, we have an Astra iPhone app, and I can show you in there's a nice. Kind of cool. This is React Native, Jake.

I got to hold on, you two. How may I assist you today, Chris? This is, it does, and I can ask it anything. You know, I can say who's here right now. Can you ask it what its favorite Rocket 3 failure was, because mine's the Kool-Aid man out of the fairing? that's the best one.

We call it the cool, cool age man launch. That's the sideways thing? No, where it was in the faring and then it bunk into the faring and then ripped out of the fairing. Yeah,

that's the best one for sure. And that's where, you know, honestly, I know exactly what caused that one. And it's where, you know, humans just have to look at everything.

Well, you can't make any mistakes in this stuff. And so what agents, we have agents running 24-7 making sure that every wiring harness and drawing and requirement and, you know,

I think we'll have maybe, by the end of this year, we'll probably have maybe 150 to 200 employees. Like even we're raising hundreds of millions of dollars. We're not going to hire a lot of people. We're just going to have more AI. And we're going to give the most talented engineers in the world, most incredible tools to be 10 times more productive.

And we've seen that just pay massive dividends. So we'll probably have thousands of agents supporting hundreds of employees, is the model at Astra. Couldn't have done it as a public company. Because, you know, the first thing they do when you're a public company is they take away all your passwords. And then you hire a whole, bunch of executives and then you implement controls. And controls are, you know, it's so that this

human can't do something that that human doesn't approve. And you basically take all of your systems and you make very elaborate ways to prevent the company from doing anything without a process that can be audited. And that's a wonderful thing. But if you implement that on top of like 50 different software packages, it's a terrible thing. And I would argue that any company that is currently publicly traded cannot make the transition to AI. Because the, you know, or they certainly won't do it quickly. Because, you know, step one was take company private. Step two was get rid of all of the public company people.

Step three was give me admin on all systems. And step four is get models in-house and then, you know, accept some risks that no public CEO should accept internally to build the systems you need to operate the company as efficiently as it needs to be operated to make it work. I've had this take for a while that public companies and companies that the public market and launching rockets are incompatible because it's too it's too punctuated of an event to have like a stable stock price you know you just you can watch the chart do this so when the rocket goes up or if it crashes or if it doesn't crash or whatever I've always said that they're

incompatible so this is another reason you know watching SpaceX is stock after the successful orbital flight of Starship and it went down and everybody said well why did it go down and it was the most I'm like I've so been to this show before right I mean like our stock our stock we did a successful launch our stock went down I'm like well you there's so much selling on news you know and and what can be like that yeah like when they were like on the flight 14 when they were they were like you know wishy-washy on the orbit they're like oh we're not going to orbit and they went fume and they're like oh actually we are going to orbit it like oh man it was like You look and make so much money

just why these like changes in the Oh yeah, it's crazy. But, wow. Okay, so, I mean, it's interesting that you've got the AI going like that.

Yeah, I think, I think a lot of people would, like, I mean, if us three went on too long, they'd be like, you guys are all just talking some bullshit about this.

But I legitimately, like one of my most overriding takes, you know, especially the way you're talking about it, Chris, is that organizations used to have to be a certain size to accumulate enough software developers to make,

make a thing that was useful. And that number has decreased dramatically, which means that that level of advanced software internally is now able to be distributed across a wider set of companies. So, you know, companies that prior had to have several million dollars a year to spend on engineers, they don't need that amount of money anymore to have a couple that can actually make legitimate progress on a thing. So I think it's going to distribute that sort of talent and use case internally across a wider set of companies that had it previously. What's most interesting, too, is that you have different verticals of that software

that needs to be written, though. I'm curious how that changes the process for the code that actually goes on the vehicle, not the vehicle behind you, the one that's to your right somewhere. How is it impacting the development towards that first flight of Rocket 4? Well, a lot of the tools,

a lot of the manual things that we were doing we now have software, right? And it's software that we would have had to have a pretty large company with a lot of capital and a lot of engineers. And frankly, I've always invested a lot of money in software. And, you know, I can just give you examples. I mean, we had a system for requirements management. Very expensive software. It's a company that's been around for decades.

And, you know, as a private company that I was trying to, you know, economically, you know, we had a quarter of a billion dollars of EBITA losses in 2023. In 2024, we took the company private, got it down to 60. In 2025, we broke even on an EBITDA basis. And we broke even on a cash basis. And so, you know, well, the way we did that is we had to look at every single expense. And we had to make really tough decisions by do we spend money on this? And so we had a requirements management system that cost a quarter of a million dollars a year. And honestly, we looked at it and we said the the subscriptions up, do we pay for this? And so that weekend, I wrote it. And it is literally a tab in Astra, which is our software. And it is better. My name is now taken, by the way.

Some IP issues you got going on over at open AI. They're doing an, this two will pass. It's just an AI. We use Astra at Astra. I was just talking to Sam the other day. I need to give him some shit over that. But some licensing out of that. Yeah. But I mean, but honestly, the ability to take a very, you know, this is a system that's been around for decades that's used by a lot of companies and for I literally, literally in a weekend made it better.

And most of what it is, we don't even need because it's our existing identity management systems and teams and things like that. We had a payroll person, and they were tricked into sending some of our employees PII to somebody, and we fired them. And I said, well, what is payroll? They said, well, you know, they chase employees to determine whether they're here or not, and hourly employees have to comply with all these things. And so I have this thing in the iPhone

app where, you know, we know the geoffence of the office. When an hourly employee shows up, we pay them. When they leave, we don't. Boom. Now we don't have a payroll person. And that's basically a full-time head that I can hire a technician or a machinist or an engineer with, right? You don't need a payroll person anymore. And we had full-time Salesforce.com people and full-time, you know, workday people. All these systems had teams of people in the overhead department. And now the overhead department is empty.

And yet the company has never been running faster. I would bet that a lot of people have no concept of how expensive some of those systems are too, because I've done some projects where we integrate, you know, things like Salesforce. The price in a large organization, that acts so quickly. It's like unfathomable how much those costs can climb. And then you end up making all these compromises. Like, well, maybe we don't get, you know, let's not get a license for everyone in the company. We'll just get it for a few different people or we'll find some tricky way to reuse licenses. And then, and then it's like, well, they need to integrate it. So then like you say, yeah, you hire a Salesforce person.

You're like, so now you're hiring an engineer whose specialty is like paying another company money. And it's like, it's very, it's just wild how fast that can add up. And I mean, I was almost like before AI, I was like, we should just always write it on software anyway. And now it just makes that to me so much more sense. So, yeah, rockets are hard, but it makes it harder if you have unnecessary expenses. One of the things I like to say is if you, you know, the thing about a rocket is that you have no room for waste. I mean, every single component has to have a purpose. You have to engineer all of the unnecessary mass out of the thing.

That is also true of a rocket company, right? I mean, you need to be incredibly efficient, right? You can't do things that are, you just, that's why so many fail. Most rocket companies don't fail because the rocket fails. Most never even build a rocket, right? Because the overhead associated with building a machine capable of building the machine crushes most entrepreneurs and most teams before they ever even fly. So arguably, the same principles you apply to having a great rocket,

you apply to having a great rocket company. And AI, if you're able to embrace that fully, there's never been a single more significant opportunity to make an efficient company than AI. And you have to be a private company, in my view. Like, speaking to somebody who ran the company as a public company a private company. This take private was critical

to give us the ability to do what we've got. What we had to do to make the most efficient rocket company. Let's go back to the rocket for a minute too because I had like two other questions in the... I mean, in that vein,

very much in that vein, if you're thinking of this as like a reimagining of the company structure, I'm curious what you make of, I mean, you're a guy who's been on the internet. You've got a reputation.

You personally, Astra, General. What of the criticisms of Ashtra's past, current, whatever? Which of those do you find legitimate and the things that you look at and go like, yeah, these are the things we got to work on? Which other ones do you say, like, that's just some internet drama that we should ignore entirely? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think that what largely is the perception of the company has been, for better, for worse, amplified almost like a fun house mirror by the HBO film, by books and things, by probably

a lot of X things and Reddit things that I don't even look at. I mean, you scrap it up. Come on, Chris. You're in there. You're throwing bows out there. Come on. Don't act like you're not. Come on. Don't act like you're not. You're getting eyeballs in that room that you're sitting in. I know it. You're out there throwing elbows. Oh, God, what's he saying? It's live. We can't. I think one thing is, I've never really felt a lot of competition with Peter, you know, and I think that's been one of these things that's been out there. I think the film... I didn't bring him up. I didn't bring him up. I feel like you did. I feel like you do. You brought him up first. I didn't say his name. But that's a big one. You know, there's... I think what I

really find challenging is just making this stuff work. I mean, I wake every day thinking about how do we overcome all of the challenges associated with, you know, making both the company and also of the rocket, a successful, you know, successful business with a successful system. I think that gets, that's somewhat boring. And I think that that gets under in the Funhouse mirror. That is a little section that you just don't even see. It's just how hard it is to keep the team together, to raise the capital, to kind of keep the focus.

Astra is only just turning 10 years old. And I think people don't appreciate that. A lot of that film was filmed in the first year or two of our existence. And we were launching rockets, right? And so I think that's, you know, this is rocket 4.0. I mean, how many rockets, how many versions, and these are totally different rockets, I mean, how many versions of rocket systems does the average rocket company ever even achieve, let alone within 10 years, right?

And I think that's, I think that's another thing. I think that the thing that we learned was that was probably a little too fast, right? That, you know, when you decide to do something, you know, there's amount of effort that goes into making it work once. and I think a lot of people underestimate what it takes to make it work reliably and repeatedly. And what comes next so Rocket 3 at work, it didn't work, it worked, it didn't work.

What was missing was an enormous amount of work that went into supplier quality management and quality management and systems engineering to make sure all of your test coverage was equally distributed. You can't over test something over here at the expense of under-testing something over there.

You can't over-engineer this part at the expense of under engineering that part. So there's a lot of, there's frankly a lot of effort that goes into making sure I put enough energy into this but not too much because you go out of business. And enough energy into that.

And it's about making sure you have like a, my mental model is it's like a flat landscape of risk, right? Where I don't want to have too much risk over here. I don't want a mountain of risk over here and a valley over here, right? And that's what happens naturally in an organization. You have very talented employees that will over-engineer this, but that is bad, right?

Because if you've over-engineered this, you've put resources and time into something that probably took resources and time away of something else, either schedule or cost. Like you couldn't even test or make use of that benefit that you gained because the other areas were so lacking. And so balancing it advances the ball together in a way. And especially in a rocket, you have the weakest link problem, right? It's like, it doesn't matter if you're ferrying was amazing if the engine fails, the whole thing's done, right? Your igniter sucks. You don't find out anything is useful.

The thing about the rocket is every link is the weakest link, right? By definition, right? You can't carry margin anywhere, right? So anything that you under invest in test, underinvest in engineering, you just don't even know that you did, right? And, you know, that's, I would say that's probably the biggest lesson for me is just the importance of systems engineering, quality, making sure the investments across everything are as consistent as possible.

and ideally you want everybody to finish their stuff at the exact right time so it all converges perfectly in time and space and then you have a successful flight. That's so hard to do. I think people don't appreciate that. So what were the peaks and valleys on Rocket 3? What did you feel like got too much attention and not enough in the Rocket 3 world? Well, I mean, I think like we got to orbit pretty quickly and blessing and curse. I think when we also raised a ton of capital at that point and we hired people.

people to go work on the next rocket, we weren't ready to work on the next rocket. This idea that we could work on two rockets at once, I have a bunch of scar tissue around that. And that's why, you know, when our competitors do it, I'm, you know, I'm like, okay, good luck with that. Because it is, it is extremely hard. If you haven't done it successfully once, uh, to, to try to go do it again. And you, you know, you've done it once. Um, one of my, um, kind of, uh, advisor, mentor invested in one of my companies was he said there are three Ms. First, you have to make something. And then you have to master something. And then you matter. Right. And a lot of people, they think, oh, I started a rocket company. I matter. No, you don't. You didn't even made anything yet. Right. A lot of people,

like, okay, I got to orbit once. Okay. Who cares? Right. Scale is what makes innovation matter. Just because you have one flight that works. Who cares? You haven't changed anything. You haven't impacted anybody. You've just made it work once. And so mastering something in this is really hard, right? And I would argue SpaceX has really mastered this, right? And it takes a long time to master something. SpaceX is 24 years old.

Rocket Lab is 22 years old. We're 10. We're like a toddler. Okay? Like, yeah, we're going to get rocket four flying and then we're going to master it. So for the next 10 years, I'm not going to go build a bigger rocket. We're going to master the thing that we've, we've set. out to master, and there could be thousands of our rockets in a hundred countries. And that's

what I want to do. I want to have a global footprint of launch presence. I want to go to New Zealand, you know, and nice. Just to pick one random. At total random. Yeah. I'm sure they'll let you in. Yeah, that'll be easy. I think Australia needs you more for what it's worth. They're got there had some problems down there. They were trying to get a space port together. They're struggling. Yeah, they don't have any rockets. That's the thing. No one has rockets. Yeah. Yeah. Jake's trying to buy some. He's trying to get some right now. He's trying to, this is an act of diplomacy here. Jake's trying to get some rockets right this second. Call up my buds on the East Coast there. Let's get her done. Listen, man, he's coming to my part of the East Coast first, Jake.

What do you guys think? You've seen the, you've seen the outside in. I mean, what's the, what's the different, when you talk to me and you guys are probably closer to this, what are your, what are your thoughts? What, what, what's your advice to me leading aspect back in this next chapter? Back to the pad. You're selling us hard on the AI front because we're, we're of that ilk and too much to our listeners, sugar, chagrin probably, Jake. And we haven't on it, we haven't talked to many space companies about that. And I would, you know, straight off the top of my dome, I feel like you're probably right about the way that this infiltrates large companies versus smaller companies. And I think, you know, in the rest of my life, I run a very tiny company of a couple

of people who are really good at software designing and developing things. And I feel like we have a major advantage right now because of our small size. So you're selling me on that. I still feel like the reputational aspect there, though, of Asthma before and the tropics situation, all that. Like, that to me feels like you're uphill climb, right? That when you're going, and I don't know how your customer conversations are going, but that would feel like the uphill climb to me. But then again, you're buoyed by what Jake brought up early on, which is the shifting dynamic of launch services that we have a thesis on the show where, like, SpaceX is going to be uninterested in selling other people launches right now because they can make so much more money

with their launches themselves than they could by sending it to someone else. And pretty much every launch is bought up. So like, that's booing you in that there's just not a lot of, not a lot of launches to buy available right now. So to me, it's a mixed bag at the moment. I don't know. I used to be in love with the idea of the, you know, one-ton launcher ideal, but it hasn't panned out in the same way.

Yeah. I'm kind of stuck on that. No one's pulled it off. I mean, I think Rocket Labs Electron is a couple hundred kilograms. You know, you had ABL here for a while. You had Virgin Orp for a while. I mean, I think there were some attempts at it, But, you know, we get back to only SpaceX that's really achieved scale here, really.

And, you know, and I think Rocket Lab, you know, is now going to go try with Neutron to achieve scale with a similarly large reusable vehicle. And it's just really hard to do this. And I think, you know, you're only going to see companies that don't give up succeed. You know, you've got to have an end. I think if, you know, if there's anything that is true about Astros that this is a team that's never going to give up. And, you know, we will.

we will persevereate. And Elon's done the same thing. The first couple of Falcon ones didn't work out either. And Thomas Zerberkin, who's on your show, you know, when he was doing tropics. You know, the whole idea there was the only needed like two or three of those, two out of three of those things to work for the overall program to work. So while I felt bad, that that stopped just shy of putting his satellites in an operational orbit, it's great that Rocket Lab got the rest of them up there. Because I wanted to kill our program because the rocket was too small. I mean, so not zero part of me wanted to convince NASA to let us spend another six months flying out those, those missions. But I love NASA because they knew that that program, the Vader program, which were still a part of, was trying to get more capacity for more science. As a shots on goal guy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so Thomas is brilliant. And he was very, you know, we talked and he was very supportive.

And NASA maintained that contract so that we could continue to deliver for them. So, and that's what you need. You need the government agencies to lean in or there's just simply going to not be a product like the one we're creating. Jake, give us your Astro Report card. I got to go. It's your turn. No, it's good. I think you nailed that.

I mean, if I'm you, Chris, like, well, I'm losing sleep and where I'm spending all my thought process is like, how do we get to the end of, like, you're trudging through the graveyard of a bunch of one ton rockets, right? It's like it's like one, two. It's like six or something. We can name off the top of the head that didn't pan out. So like, how do I get to the end of that graveyard? And then I think, I don't know, the only other big one that I would be like spending a lot of thought process on is like most of these other rocket companies have sort of given signals that the margin on launch is not enough to sustain long term. And so you've got the old Apollo fusion stuff. Like they've got that business line, which is great.

But there's probably more differentiation you end up having to do. And so that's that's probably what I'm thinking about. Well, maybe. You said you don't want to go build big satellites. Yeah, I'm not big satellites. Yeah. Other stuff. I mean, I do think, what we're seeing is we're seeing an enormous amount of capital being invested in companies that just can't get to orbit. And they all have some satellites that are ideally launched with our vehicle.

So I think it comes down to it doesn't matter if we can't deliver, right? So we've just got to get the rocket out. It matters a little. It's got to matter a little. What do you mean by that? But it doesn't matter for me delivering. to my actual report card. What do you mean? It doesn't matter if you can't deliver. You have to, right? Well, I mean, we need to deliver a reliable rocket that we can operate with margin at scale. And then the world's our oyster, right? And very few companies ever pull that off.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the, that's the LDR. So we got to get out there, got to launch, got to show everybody, we're back. And we've got, we have a factory now that can produce two to three hundred of these things per year, right here. I have no debt, right? We're break even, EBidon cash. So we're a company, we are a very viable company in that regard. You look at our competitors, they're losing enormous amounts of money. They haven't built the factory yet. They have to raise a lot more money to deliver. When we come back with this rocket four, it's a rocket manufactured on the production line that can produce hundreds of rockets a year. So I can actually scale without having to convince you that we need to go raise more money and spend years building

a factory. So that's kind of cover the token cost, right? Token cost is your new overhead. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, overhead department turned into a server farm running, you know, InVIDIA Nemo models or something in there. Cheeks. Tokens are expensive. But, you know, a lot of competitions happening there as well.

That's great. I mean, we're seeing, you know, we're using a lot of open AI, anthropic, other models. Well. Lots of crock. Listen, I'm a, maybe not crock. I don't know. It's probably good at stain of the steel. I don't know.

Chris, I'm going to come visit. I'm not that far from Wallops. I mean, by which I mean I'm four hours away like everybody in the world is from Wallops. It takes four hours to get there from wherever you live in the entire world. I'm convinced of that fact. But I'm coming down. I'm seeing this thing. I've got to let me in.

It's going to be awesome. And we'll let you know when the date gets nailed down. We're trying to finalize it all with the FAA right now. And it's going to be amazing. The earlier launches, we built rockets so quickly and we launched them. I didn't even go to, I've never been to one of our launches. We said, Red Team goes out to the field. I'll stay here with the rest of the team in headquarters.

I might go to one of these because, I mean, the amount of energy that went into this thing over so many years, it is palpable. So many people have made so many sacrifices to see this rocket come back to the pad and fly. There will be a lot of emotion and there'll be, I think, just a lot of, you know, I will, I will feel so much joy when I see this thing come together and successfully fly. So many people have worked so hard. All right. Maybe Jake will, Jake currently has an embargoed on traveling to the U.S. in our political moment, Chris.

So we're trying. He won't be there, but I'll, he's also a Canadian show. When you launch it from Halifax, then I'll see that one. How's that? Well, we're working on it. We've got, yeah. There we go. The deal.

Set in the bar real high. I love that, Jake. Well, Chris, thanks so much for hanging out with us. This is awesome. Good time, chat with you. Thank you guys. And I appreciate you guys following it. And hopefully we'll be the first launch out of Canada.

Orbital launch out of that would be kind of fun. That would be something. What do you think they'll give you? What do you think like the trophy is for that? Maybe. Maybe. be what would that be? Do you get to hoist the Stanley Cup?

You get like a one moment with the cup. Actually, that's our thing. We don't do that anymore. Yeah, it's our thing. That actually happens when you launch out of Florida. Oh, hot. Too soon. Yeah, sorry, Jake.

I think it's just Putin or something. I don't know. Yeah. You get a double double a pack of timpets. You get as much payload as you launched in Poutine delivered. Make that deal, Chris. That's the trade. That's it.

It's like a little for an offset. It would be a trade deficit. People will hate it. It's a reverse tariff. Oh, shit. Well, thanks so much, Chris. Jake, you know what we're doing next week? Oh, I mean, Chris, you love movies about space rocket launch companies, right?

Yeah, yeah, of course. It's mine. Yeah, yeah. What are we talking about a Firefly one, Jake? I feel like I was not involved in the planning of this. Yeah, there's a documentary out about Firefly, and the, the, documentary makers are coming on and talk about it. So we're going to learn a bit about Firefly next week.

It should be good. Look at that. They've had some chapters. I mean, that's a journey. I'm sure there's some stories there. Amazing. Awesome. Yeah, yeah.

I'll tune in. I appreciate you guys. Thanks so much, Chris. We will see you all later. Bye. All right. Bye, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.