Shawn Ryan Show - The Space Technology That Could Change History Forever

Episode Date: October 27, 2026

When I had Erin Brockovich on the Shawn Ryan Show, we took a deep dive into data centers and their impact on our water supply, power grid, and ecosystems. After watching that conversation, Baiju Bhatt, my guest on episode #223, reached out with a potential solution. What if we don’t need to build data centers on Earth at all? I joined Baiju for a live conversation about his latest venture, Cowboy Space, and his plan to put AI data centers in orbit. We explored the technology behind that vision, the challenges of making it a reality, and how moving computing infrastructure into space could help meet growing demand without putting more strain on the resources we depend on here at home. Baiju Bhatt Links: Website - https://www.cowboyspace.com/ X - https://x.com/BaijuBhatt IG - https://www.instagram.com/realbaijubhatt Robinhood - https://robinhood.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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No credit check. And if you're ever in a pinch, Spot Me lets you overdraft up to $200 fee fee. free. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime.com slash SRS. That is chime.com slash SRS. Sign up now. It only takes a few minutes. Chime is a fintech, not a bank, banking services and chime card provided by Chim's bank partners. Qualifying direct deposits required. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com slash disclosures for details. A couple months ago, I did an episode with Aaron Brockovich all about data centers and how bad they are for the environment, how much of our energy they're sucking up, and how concerned

we all need to be about them. Well, a couple weeks later, my friend Bejubot called me and said he had a solution. So I flew out to San Francisco. Yesterday, getting ready to leave here heading back to Tennessee and interviewed them all about it I think this is a real viable solution taking these data centers off the earth so enjoy the interview enjoy the unveil let me know what you guys think see you see how's everybody doing tonight I just want to say thank you all for coming I had an awesome day with Bejou today, looking at all the new stuff that he's developing, and I've been really looking forward to tonight.

So it's going to be a good night. Bejou, thanks for having me. Shall we, big guy? So Bejou, I know we got some big news. You have some big, big news to go over tonight. But before we get into that, can you tell me a little bit about you and how you came to the conclusion to found this new company. Yes.

So, first of all, thank you all for coming. Welcome to this first ever event that we're doing with the Cowboys Space Corporation called Big Sky Rising. And we're excited to show you guys what we've been working on. But the journey here has been about two and a half years of working on the company full-time. But as my family knows, it's been. a lifelong passion of mine. I grew up with my parents were sitting right there, with my dad

working as a contract research scientist at NASA through my childhood. So I kind of grew up around the aerospace world. And I think one of the biggest observations of that from childhood was that it felt like the good stuff happened before, you know? Like it felt like all the interesting stuff happened and that a lot of what NASA was when I was a kid, it felt kind like a museum, right? And you'd be like, oh, here's an important part in human history. And it has never really made sense to me why it wasn't still happening. But the journey from there to what would become cowboy space was much longer.

So about two and a half years ago, started this company with a vision of building the first American energy company in space. And why I do that? Well, let's actually take a look at the mission of the company, which is a Powering humanity from the high frontier. The thought process behind this was looking at the commercial applications for outer space and thinking to myself, if humanity was going to be the space-faring civilization that all of us wanted it to be, it wasn't going to get there on the path that it was.

The space industry through the majority of our lifetimes before the last 15 years or so has been for the government, by the government, at government pricing. Every mission is driven by the government. And what that means is, is as political wins change, any of these things change, the space industry is one of the first ones to go. Now, I'm going to kind of contrast that with the commercial world, right? The world I want to live in, and the world I want this company to help us create is one where there's a new generation of young people that are pursuing,

careers in this industry. So. You know, last time we were together, I think it was about a year, year and a half ago. And you were building satellites in space to be solar energy into Earth. And now you've got a little more to talk about today. Yeah, a lot more to talk about today. So what was it that shifted focus? was the main thing that shifted focus into this?

Yeah. Well, let's take a look at what we've done over the last two and a half years. It's been a quick one. Company started out with the idea of building a power grid in space and an old NASA idea called space-based solar power. Had you ever heard of that before we talked about it? No. Never.

It was actually born of the last energy crisis. And the thought process that I had when starting the company was, let's take this old science fiction idea. and see if you can make it science reality. Like, why hasn't anybody actually tried this in earnest? Like, you know, there's got to be a way to bring this idea to life. And a couple of weeks ago, we put our first satellite in space. So, so far, it's up there.

It's talking to us. We're testing a lot of the functionality on it, and we're getting pretty close to actually showing off what it can do. But that might be another one of these events that we do together, which I think would be really cool. But more to come on that later. The company started in a tiny little garage in El Granada, not a garage, actually.

It was more like an apartment place. It actually was maybe just an apartment. Like I actually don't think it was an office space. And from there, built our first satellite, put it up in space, like I said, relatively recently. And it was this past spring that when we announced our series B, Fund, raise, we both changed the name of the company and announced this bigger plan that we had around building data centers in orbit.

And this even bigger idea that we were going to build a rocket to get those data centers to space. And I think a lot of people thought that that was kind of crazy, but I don't think they're going to think that it's that crazy after this. So can I show you something? I love to see it. We've been cooking. Oh, we've been cooking.

Saw this earlier today. Can you describe what we're looking at here? Yeah. This is the first bit of our engine turning on. So for those of you that don't know, we announced in the spring that we were going to build a rocket to put data centers in space. And the reason we had this thesis was because we knew that if we wanted to actually make something cost competitive here, we'd need to control the economics of it. Now, people said, oh, Bejou, you're going to build a rocket?

Like, you and what army? Well, this army. Actually, some of them are here. A little, I don't know, if you want to do this now, but we have our head of rocket propulsion here, Mr. Warren Lamont. Lord knows, that man will give a speech if I give him a chance to, so we'll save that for the end. What you're looking at here is five months of work.

And it's what I would call turning hardware. into data or because we blew blue part of the engineer you built us from nothing to that in five months about yeah less than five months yeah it's been a quick one the goal and we're going to talk a lot more about what this is just just so you guys know what we're looking at here this is at nasa stennis and it's a testing facility for rocket engines this is the gas generator it's what's drives one of the fundamental parts of the rocket engine called the turbo pumps. We'll talk a lot more about what the rockets do, how they work, what the different parts of them are. But I think this, I mean, this is about as real as real gets, right?

We're doing it. We're building the engines, and we think that this is going to be one of the critical pieces of technology that's going to let us get to orbit relatively quickly. So why, sorry. Why have you decided to, but not only transition to data centers, which we'll get into later, but I'm curious, why are you building the rockets themselves to deliver the data centers to space? Why have you decided to do that? Great question.

And I think that there's a few aspects to this, but I think fundamentally is a lack of commercial access to orbit right now, right? We know that there's one major company that controls the majority of access to space, and they've said probably that they're going to be pretty focused on their own missions to orbit. We want to build a company that builds an independent data center in space, an energy grid in space. And to do this, because the energy industry and all these industries are so commoditize, the economics really matter, and controlling the economics really matter.

And so this is like one of the critical parts. parts of this, and we want to do a lot of it. We want to build a lot of data centers in space, because I think that's what the problem calls for. But rather than actually talking about a little bit, why don't we show people what that means? Well, first of all, let's talk about why. Why on Earth are we talking about building data centers in orbit? Why on Earth is this even remotely a good idea or worth talking about?

Well, there's a bunch of reasons why, and I hope that by the the end of the day to day, most people in this audience would agree with my viewpoint that it's actually a pretty good idea to do. I mean, a lot of, I just did an interview with Aaron Brockovich, who is a lot of Americans, I think a lot of people in the world are really concerned with the amount of energy that the data centers are consuming. They're concerned about the water supply. There hasn't been a lot of talk about putting these things in space.

I think it's a big problem you're tackling here. Yeah, yeah. There's a few advantages of doing this stuff in space, and you hit on a couple of them. And I'll just kind of go over this quickly so people know what we're talking about. What you're looking at here on the screen, little orange lines represent where the satellites would be in orbit.

And you can see the way that the satellites are positioned, they're illuminated by the sun nearly continuously. So we put our satellites in these polar orbits. They're called sun-synchronous orbits. Some people call them the Terminator orbit, which I think is pretty cool. But in these orbits, your satellites are illuminated nearly continuously. And so what we're talking about doing here

is taking what was already one of the cheapest forms of energy production, which is traditional solar, and putting in an environment where it produces even more power per unit solar panel. So there's clearly something there that if we can harness it in the right way, is a driver of much more energy and ideally much more economically. So that's the first one. The second one is, as we look at data center buildouts, it's fundamentally a real estate problem.

It's real estate development. It's procuring the natural resources to power the data centers. whether it's energy, water, land use rights. We are not using anybody's land in outer space in case anybody, like, didn't get that part of this. And the last part about this is, is, I mean, again, should not be a huge surprise to anybody, but there's not literal power plugs coming down

from the satellite into the power grid in your local neighborhood. This has no effect on your power grid. And so the idea here is that we as a country, I think, can have our cake and eat it too, right? We can both lead in frontier AI and not have, you know, these negative effects on American houses that, I think, it's pretty universal in 2026. Yeah, it seems a lot of strain is going to come off the power grid. I mean, I think the power grid is something, anybody who's educated on it is concerned about it. Yeah. And so, I mean, is one of these satellites going to be able to produce enough energy with just solar to power these, what's inside of the satellite, the data center?

It's a great question. And we're going to talk about how we get it to the size that matters. Let's actually go there now. So earlier this year, we announced to the world that we're building a constellation of these things in outer space. So it's 20,000 satellites. Each one produces about a megawatt of peak power. It's a constellation in orbit that produces about 20 gigawatts of power. There's a lot of power.

For the audience, it doesn't know what 20 gigawatts of power is. Can you give me a comparison of how much power that actually is? Yeah, I think we can do that. This is what data centers use. What am I looking at here? What is this graph? So what we're looking at here is power drawn gigawatts by data centers per year. And you can see here, it's exploding, right?

The amount of energy that data centers are going to use, I mean, in 28 and 29, And you can look at the numbers of how much power data centers are using even in 2023. And the effects that it's having on people's water bills, people's electric bills. I know you've had a lot of firsthand experience with this stuff and talk to people that have lived with it. It's real. And we see it in American politics.

Data centers are pretty unpopular. But they don't have to be because we can build them in outer space. So this is roughly the scale of what we're. contemplating with our constellation build. It's building a power grid in orbit that generates the same amount of power that all data centers in the U.S. used just three years ago. How are you going to cool these things? I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people are concerned about the water.

The data centers pollute the water. They use all the water. Worry about the depletion of our aquifers. I mean, it's a massive concern. Luckily, water's not very good at cooling stuff in space. And so we'll talk a little bit more about how we keep these things cool in space. The physics of it are pretty interesting. It involves actually using the coldness of outer space

and the temperature differential to emit heat in outer space. So just a little reminder, the way that we all on Earth experience heat transfer totally different than in our space, right? On Earth, you experience heat transfer through conduction, meaning heat transfer through convection, fans blowing, and then radiative, like in the case of something getting so hot that it glows. In space, there's no air, and you're kind of not really touching very much. And so that radiative heat transfer is your main method of dissipating heat from the system. And it's kind of interesting because when people talk about data centers in space, this concept of how do you dissipate the heat that they generate is front and center. But when you talk to people that actually work in the space industry,

it's like every single spacecraft has a thermal budget. Like you can't put stuff in space and not think about how it dissipates heat. for this very reason. And so we can get to a little bit more of that in a little bit. Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about how big this thing is. I think you know a little bit about this state. That would be my state.

Yeah. So we're contemplating building a power grid in space. That's about the size of the power grid of Tennessee. 20.6 gigawatts. And when you look at numbers this big, I think it should become pretty clear that this amount of energy is just not available on Earth. Like, we would have to fundamentally rethink

the way the entire electrical grid works. And there's definitely people out there that are doing it. But as we get further along in this, we'll talk about why we think that not only does this solve the sort of macro of the problem, but it also makes it fundamentally more economical. So we believe that space is inevitable. It's a natural place for collecting.

electricity, there's an abundance of space to do it in, the method of heat transfer is actually well established, and then the real challenge becomes how you do it, and what exactly you're doing to make this happen. So you guys want to see what our satellites look like? I would love to see what they look like. So there's 20,000 of these things going to go into space. Each one, it's pretty big. 20,000?

Introducing today for the very first time, the big iron. It's a fundamentally novel approach to computing in the, or to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion, because rather than using the satellite, the rocket as a cargo vehicle to taking a payload to space, our approach is fundamentally different. The cargo vehicle is, the payload in space and we'll explain exactly why we did it this way and why it really

matters so the cargo payload is actually going to transform into the satellite that collects the power so the idea is is that you have the two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite and this is to differentiate from other space companies that it will pack the top of a satellite with a top, pack the top of a rocket with a stack of satellites, imperial class satellites. Whereas what we're doing is actually using the whole vehicle as a satellite. And so it's a little hard to tell from this. So let's kind of show you a little bit about what is going into one of these things. So there's the big iron. So you can see here, it gets to space. This is the whole upper stage of the rocket.

We deploy out the solar panels, and then the shell of the rocket, the faring, folds out and becomes the method of heat transfer. It's pretty big. How big is it? It's bigger than a football field. It's 15,000 kilograms, roughly. It produces enough power to power about 800 homes. Like, it's a big old thing. And when we talk about power in the data center world, I think sometimes we lose sight of

just how much power we're actually talking about here. This is a megawatt of power. This is like a pretty significant amount of power. We generate it with pretty traditional solar panels. Each one of our big irons, additionally, has six laser links on it to be able to transmit data to neighboring big irons or to transmit data down. We're targeting very high bandwidth laser links. Our team has been working on laser and optic development for the better part of two and a half years now.

And the big relevant bit here is the amount of compute that we're able to put into the satellite. So each one of these things, we're budgeting about five racks of, for example, NVIDIA-NVL-72 racks per spacecraft. But it's kind of hard to tell how big this is. So maybe this will help. Yep. The American football field. Yeah, and a big iron, which is obviously why we need a big space to build the big iron. But let's just kind of articulate what we're doing here. and kind of the simplest terms, right? If you look at what our approach is,

it's building a rocket that is just big enough to build, to put this payload into space. And this basic approach is driven by the idea that when you're talking about compute, more interconnectivity is inherently better than less, right? And so rather than building a vehicle that can take many different satellites to space, space that could do AI compute, you'd actually rather have one big one.

You'd actually rather have one big iron. Oh, good. But as we all know, Cowboy Space is not the only space company in the world. There's another company out there that's also building these. And when we take a look at that architecture from the Empire, there, you see the Imperial class satellites. They're just way smaller than ours. Those are smaller than yours.

Tiny. Each one of them packs about one rack. Ours tracks five. And so whether you're taking a starship or a star destroyer to orbit, we think Big Iron actually delivers more interconnected compute per satellite than what the Empire is working on. And if you kind of think about what this thing is, and we'll talk more about how this thing works and what it does, this is not the performance of the whole vehicle and the way

that we get it to space is oriented around speed to market. So I'll probably talk about that next, right? How are you going to get something that big into space? Yeah. Well, it's got some big specs. So a little bit on the rocket architecture. It's about 86 meters tall, 4.7 meter diameter. We're sort of pushing the boundaries of what's road transportable.

That's kind of how we selected it. We'll talk a little bit more about our engine architecture in a minute. It's called Clydesdale. The booster stage has nine engines on it. The upper stage has a single Kleisdale engine on it. From a rocket architecture perspective, we're going to where we think the results, where kind of the end goal is. And so from that perspective, we're starting out with liquid oxygen and liquid methane

as the propellant, stainless steel rocket, and it's sized to take, as we talked earlier, about 15 metric tons to orbit. So you can kind of think of it as sort of pushing the boundaries of what would be a road transportable rocket. And as we will get further along into this, we'll talk about the logistics of bringing these things to life. But if we started out the discussion by articulating what the problem to solve is, which is that we have to put up a ton of compute and we have to power it in a somewhat novel way, if

If that's the why, this is how you do it. A little bit more on the engine. And this is the brainchild of Warren, who, again, is sitting right there. There she is. Clydesdale engine. That's what you saw us testing, at least a part of, earlier in the video. And this is a gas generator cycle engine. This is not a racehorse.

It's meant to be reliable and fast to build. There's definitely more performance in this engine. We can solve that problem at a later point in time. The goal with this program is to bring this capability online as quickly as possible. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But each engine produces about 300,000 pounds of thrust, which is kind of difficult to even wrap your head around. How close are you to this?

I mean, this is what we saw. This was one of the first videos we watched. Yeah. And then being at your facility today talking to Warren, I mean, from hiring him to getting that, was that the first test? We did some testing a little bit before that this week, but I think that's in earnest the first test. And that was today.

Yeah. And the next test is tomorrow morning. At 7 a.m., right? How are you moving that fast? We are very motivated. We really, really care about making this happen. And you just can't fake that, you know? Like the most interesting things go to the people in my thought are the most motivated.

It's been my experience. But rather than waxing poetic, let's talk about rocket engines. Yeah. Yeah. So this one is, I mean, these things are crazy how powerful they are. It's like kind of difficult to wrap your head around it. And I asked the team to kind of try to articulate some way to explain what this thing does. And I think the best they came up with is one of these little engines here has enough thrust to hurl 50 F-150s to orbit. Yeah, we were talking, we're having this whole conversation about, you know, it's like, well, we're brainstorming all the different stuff we can do to. to test the engines, test the vehicles, and there was a discussion at some point. By the way, there's very opinionated people at this company. And if you have an idea about something, there will almost certainly be somebody in the corner of being like, terrible idea, never do it.

But this terrible idea was doing the hopping, like building a small rocket and doing little hops and staying under a certain height limit. And the point I was told was that these engines are so powerful, and you're just like, straight to orbit. So it would be a different engine. But that being said, this is the engine that's the single architecture that actually works for both the upper and lower stage of the rocket. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. What I want to come back to here, and I think the most important thing about all of this, is how do you make this economical?

Meaning, we could do all of these things. Sure, we could build data centers in space. but if it's wildly expensive, it's a little economic utility. And so the question that I've had from the beginning of starting this company is, what is the path to cost-competitive economics? Like, how do you get the cost of producing the output service, in this case a GPU hour, to be on-cost parity with what a cost to build it terrestrially? And if you really think about it, this is fundamentally an apples-to-orange comparison, right?

Because on the one hand, if you want to power a GPU on the ground, you need a building, you need a power plug, you need some cooling, and you need to do real estate stuff, right? In the case of powering that thing in orbit, you're talking about putting methane in an engine and like building a structure and like leaving it up there for a decade or five years or whatever. All this to say, the physics of how you produce the same thing are very different, but that does not, that has not prevented us from asking the question and really answering what does it cost and how low can we go. And going real low means being creative. And this is hopefully going to put a little bit more color on the idea earlier of the entire vehicle, the entire rocket is the data center.

Why would we do that? Like, why, what's the point of that? Well, let me show you. It's so that we have parts on our rocket that do two jobs, so that we don't need two parts. And I think this is going to be pretty cool. So I want you to think about a rocket in two forms. One, on the way to space, and two, when it's already in space.

So on the left side, you'll see pictures of different parts of the rocket on Ascent when it's a rocket. And the second one will show you what that looks like, it's in orbit and it's a satellite. So first things first, the outer shell of the rocket, the nose cone, the aerodynamic shell of the rocket has a specific purpose on a cent. It's for aerodynamics, right? In our design, when we get to orbit, the actual faring folds out and it starts working as a radiator. And so that extra metal, the The metal that we would have taken up anyways as a part of the rocket itself does a part of

the satellite's job when it's there. And in turn, less stuff you have to take up. Similarly, propellant. Our design calls for a two-stage rocket that gets to a parking orbit, and then from there, it uses a different method of propulsion to get to its destination. In this case, it's electric propulsion, and the propulsion that The propellant that we're using is ammonia. Now, the interesting thing about ammonia is that it also works well as a coolant.

And so the same working fluid that we use as a propellant on a scent, when we're in orbit, we can use that same tank and the residual ammonia in it as a cooling loop for the GPUs. So imagine the tank of propellant that basically pushes this thing up to orbit when it's there, will then take that same tank and start running it through the GPUs and extracting heat out from them and running it out to those big wings and bringing them all out to an even temperature so they can then dissipate the heat out. Genius. Double duty.

Oh, this one is my favorite. So, cold gas thrusters. Rockets have cold gas thrusters. And unlike the Empire, We've actually found a practical use for cold gas thrusters that does not involve kickflips. The cold gas thrusters on our upper stage help orient the vehicle. When the thing is actually in orbit, we use the pressurized tanks to push the solar booms out. Didn't even need to do a kickflip, and it's actually useful.

Now, we will be building a reusable rocket. So the booster gets reused. And we talked about this a moment ago. Because it's one engine architecture between the two stages of the rocket, when we get to an engine that is approaching end of life, we'll take that engine and we'll put it on the upper stage. Because that engine, when it's done with its orbit, side actually gets deorbitant along with the tank.

So the last use of engine as is to take the second stage to orbit. So literally every part of this rocket will be reused? We're trying. We're trying. And the reason this matters is because the more efficient we can get with what we take to space. So here's basically the thing. The rocket produces thrust, right?

Every bit of thing that you're taking to space that makes money creates the equivalency between thrust and revenue, right? And so we'll say differently, what we want to do is we want to be spending our thrust on things that generate revenue, not on other stuff. So that means cutting out redundant parts because we're spending valuable thrust to get that stuff to orbit. So, for example, if every satellite needs a radiator, well, you could pack a rocket full of individual satellites that carries its own radiator, or you could reuse a part of the actual

rocket as the radiator. Does that make sense? It does make sense. Are people following this? Does this make sense? All right, cool. So I have made the point a couple of times now that none of this matters unless it's economical. And that's what we're going to do.

It's going to get cheaper every time. Yeah. Again, these are estimates. But as we see the cost of terrestrial compute actually increasing, our estimates have orbital compute actually getting cheaper. By 2031, for those of you that know me, I'll be pushing to make that happen a little bit sooner. But this is what our team put on the deck.

so. But there's a little Easter egg buried here. We're going to try to launch this thing in 2028. You're going to launch this in 2028? Yes. Our boy Warren's got a squirt cut out for him. Nervous laughter. Yeah, so what does that mean? If we want to do this, we got to get to it. And I have left the team with this mantra many a time, which is that the best way to get good at building rockets,

is by building rockets. And so we're going to start doing that. Our goal is to design a system that does a couple of things. Number one gets to cost parity or cheaper with terrestrial economics. That was the alpha and the omega of the design prompt, right? It's like how do we get there? What is the technical path to making that happen? Secondarily was how do we down select?

down select the technologies to ones that are mature enough that we feel confident we can bring them online in record time. And that's what we're talking about doing here. That involves getting to a hot fire of the whole engine sometime in the middle of next year. Getting something close to a booster testing between now and then as well. And then Before the end of 2028, our target is a first flight. Now, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen, and it's not a guarantee, but this is the kind of ambitious goal that I think is like a truth serum. It's like if you actually want to do this, then how do you do it, right?

Cut out all the noise. Like, what is the bare minimum path? What is the path that actually captures the outcome that you want without all the other stuff? And I think it's ambitious, but if it wasn't ambitious, I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. So let's show you a little bit more. Giddy up. Giddy up. So the next part of this, we're going to talk about how we do this, right?

Start out talking about why we should do it. Big Iron is what we're doing. And this is the how. And a big part of the how is actually the who. It's these folks. So I'd actually like to welcome all of our team members that are here to actually stand up. Extra special shout out to my homie Joe. This company would not have happened without him. Although he didn't wear a bolo hat, a bolo tie or a cowboy hat today. Lawyer's going to lawyer. Lawyer's going to lawyer. One of the best parts of doing something like this is working with a group of people that wants to believe that they're

They can do things that other people think it's freaking crazy. And watching those people find it in themselves to do it is a magical thing. So who are these people? So talked about Joe, spent a career law, was most recently at Skadden Arps for 16 years, is that right? We've got Chithra, who's our CFO. She was at Varda more recently and Amazon working on data centers for a long time. Where is she through?

There she is. Warren, although I think his head's big enough right now. We don't need to give him any more love. No, it really can't be big enough. We've got Reggie, Mr. Lasers, over here. We've got Ross, somewhere in the back. Tyler. Where's that Tyler at?

There he is, there's that cowboy hat. Tyler and David are the two, are the two two folks that joined us at the beginning of this year and were pretty instrumental for putting this plan together. My dear, dear friend Tom Linford. See you back there, big guy. John Sarkas. And Andrew Yarmola, who is not here, and I actually asked to put a cowboy hat on his

head because he's not here. Andrew is actually one of my oldest friends and was my classmate at Stanford. Once upon a time, three of us were working on a little company together. that would go on to be a slightly bigger company called Robin Hood. And that original crew of three people that worked on the company before all this stuff was me, Mr. Andrew Aramolo, and a guy named Vlad. Wow. Yeah.

And 2027 is the year of Goblin Mode. This is our facility in Kent, Washington. it doesn't look quite this nice right now. This is more future aspirational state. The rocket's not there yet. But look, we're gonna, we've got 260,000 square feet there. The point of this facility is this is our first production shop. And what we're gonna do here is we're going to live, breathe,

and eat the pain of making one of these things on a day-to-day basis. So it's next year is a full-on live with you. the pain, figure out all the things that you don't know that you wouldn't have known unless you just did the thing. It's, yeah, gobbling mode. What's it going to look like to get this, what you're building in there in space? It's going to involve building a lot of tents in the parking lot. Yeah.

So we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But first, we've talked about kind of how we've talked about how we can talk about how we can talk about How we get to that first launch, this facility is going to be where that happens. But I also want to give a view towards how we get to that 20,000 constellation size. Because fundamentally, like the logistics and the operations of how we do it, these are still a couple of years out from us actioning them, but we're at the point now where we're starting to design them and think through what that would be.

And so we wanted to share some of that with you guys. So, mass to orbit. You can kind of summarize what our approach to building rocketry here is, is that rather than building one gigantic rocket, we actually think it's more economical to build a slightly smaller rocket and make more of them and launch those. And so our design for our launch facility, which we call the trailhead, is rapid deployment of multiple rockets at a time.

One of the things that we talked about in the beginning was the fact that we're putting our satellites in this like Terminator orbit, right? Well, the thing about it is, is it's the same orbit every time. And so you're launching rockets in the same trajectory, meaning that every time you're putting a data center satellite in space, your boosters landing basically the same spot. And so you design the launch operations around this. So rather than having a single launch mount per launch facility,

we contemplate having four that are active at a time. And you launch rockets two minutes apart when you see a clear window opening to get stuffed space. And as we said before, when we get to space, the booster comes right back and we get to reuse it. The goal with this approach is speed and economics. Those are kind of the two through lines of this. And what we hope to achieve with each trailhead is producing about 660 megawatts of compute per year per site.

cost is each one of these sites can be stood up relatively inexpensively. We think we can stand up the production site and the launch pads for about a billion dollars per facility. You'll have five pads or sorry, five launch mounts on the launch complex. Four will be active at a time while we refurbish one of them. And the idea is rinse and repeat. Like you can produce these things all around. at least the coastal U.S., other spots abroad as well. And I think there's one thing that's very important here, kind of in the big scheme of things,

which is where we started this conversation out, which is the idea of commercialization of outer space. I don't want to live in a world where it's entirely driven by government activities. We also don't want to live in a world where it's driven entirely by one or two companies. We need access to orbit and we need access to orbit for broad commercial activity. The bold, ambitious vision for the world we want to live in is that humanity has meaningful applications for outer space and it's not tourism, it's not just looking down at the earth, but that there's reasons that people are building this infrastructure in the most American

of senses in pursuit of their own self-betterment for the fruits of their own labor. We just don't have that in space right now. You can't do that and make a living in the way that we see the opportunity. And again, this is kind of like zooming out a little bit and talking about what we want to actually have happen here. But even in the context of developing the trailheads, right, I think this is an interesting point that I wanted to just articulate towards the end of this, which is that if you think about the future of the space industry as being one that's heavily commercial, you start looking

at launch complexes a lot more like you look at airports. And there's an entire industry there that I think is going to exist in years to come. Free markets and capitalism of financial services providing the capital to build these pieces of American infrastructure launch complexes, right? And when we look out into the future, space should be a place about economic opportunity, not for just the government, not for just one company, but for humanity as a whole. And to do that, we need more people going to space, and we need more people that have figured out how to make money in space.

And at the end of the day, that's what we care about. So let's wrap this up. I'm curious, you know, I mean, like I said, we, we, We met for the first time about a year and a half ago and it was power plants in space. Now it's data spenders in space plus delivering the payload. What do you find in is the most challenging part right now? Is it satellite communication? Is it the rockets?

The hardest part about this is building something that works at scale. out how you marshal the resources, how you stair step the deployment of resources, because we're, you know, we're still startup, which means that we have to be very judicious about what the right proof points are, right? How do we get to mature, how do we mature the right technologies of the right time, and that actually show the world the progress that's behind what we're doing? I don't know that's a great answer to it, but it's just the amount of complexity. and different moving parts of the business, the different timelines that pieces of technology are finished on,

and kind of keeping a variety of different things moving simultaneously. I mean, we are a data center company, we're a rocket company, we're a lasers and optics company, we're a photovoltaics company, and with the amount of capital that we're going to end up deploying doing this, or like a financial company as well. And a power company. And also a power company. and it sounds complicated when you say it like that.

Yeah. But the way that I think about it is actually it's just going to take a long time to put all the pieces together. Like you can have a vision for something, and if you can kind of imagine how you put it all together in a year, it's not that big of an idea. Like usually the big idea is you're like, holy shit, how do any of these pieces ever fit together? and it's kind of the magic in doing that. But there's a big but. I told you guys I'd have a surprise for you. And there is one.

Introducing the Big Iron Express. We're going to fly third-party payloads to space. It's a beautiful rocket. It's a big rocket. It can take big and beautiful payloads to space. It's about 18 tons to low Earth orbit. and we encourage anybody interested in this capability to go to cowboyspace.com and sign up. We're going to be offering access to orbit at a time when it's sorely missing.

And we think it's actually critical to the success of our business. It's also critical to the core thesis behind this, which is commercial and economic abundance in outer space. that doesn't happen if one company does this. So you're a logistics company as well? Yeah, probably. And that's all she wrote. Thank you so much.

That was pretty good on time too. Yeah.