Ep 123: The New Space Age with Palantir Alum & Apex Space CEO Ian Cinnamon

23:23Interesting. How many things have you sent up so far? So we have our first satellite that's on orbit. We have four, five more now that have been delivered to customers. Some of our customers don't want us to know if and when they're launching them on the government side. We're just the platform. They're very top secret stuff sometimes. Exactly. Most of the work we do is on the defense side. And in general in the space, what's the ratio of how much stuff there is in defense to commercial? How do you think about that so i have a slightly contrarian take on this i don't think anything is pure play commercial nothing interesting so not even starlink yeah so well starlink has started their star shield supposed to be government starlink's supposed to be commercial i guess it could be used for government stuff too look what ukraine was using it for for example yes right there's there's always going to be or or iran i guess exactly both sides yeah and well hopefully the good people on iran but yeah i guess that's a question of yes being used those that's like i think some of my friends are sending uh are sending like starlings to the to the resistance than I ran, which is good too.

24:16That is great. That's a great use case, right? That's amazing. Hopefully positive. But that's interesting. I mean, there must be some things that are purely commercial, obviously, right? There's things that are intended to be or more commercial than defense. But my point is defense always touches it one way or another. And there's some things that are pure defense, of course. But what I would say is when we look at where we're targeting our company, we don't even consider ourselves a space company. We think of ourselves as a defense company who happens to be focused on space. and really everything that we do everything we design for everything we're trying to build is all around how do we support the u.s and our allies and protect the u.s and our warfighters isn't that awkward not to get feedback on some of the satellites that are being used secretly when you when you want to get feedback yeah very very awkward yes i would love to know what's going on and it's it's uh it's one of those situations where like we have our security clearances we're we're able to have that but even then that doesn't mean that they want to tell us everything that's happening.

25:12Interesting. But you are getting some up that you're watching. It's working really well. Yes. Things are working very well. What can you say about the pipeline? It sounds like you have a lot of interesting customers right now. Yes. So one of the things that I really value, and it's actually a lesson that I think I took from how Palantir it operated, was you don't want to kind of work in a vacuum and then hope that one day somebody wants what you're selling. So my philosophy was from the very first day of the company, I wanted to actually be producing revenue and have money coming in and selling these products and not just hoping that one day people would buy it.

25:44So really getting that part of market fit early. So we've been really lucky to be selling these now. Our company is not even three years old and we don't give out our bookings and revenues numbers publicly, but it's been very, very good. No, it's very strong. And I guess your first satellite has been out for a year where there are like key lessons learned from that to do way better next time too? Yes. So the first satellite, because it was how do we move as fast as possible? We purchased a lot of those parts. We vertically integrated about 40%, but we had to buy a lot of parts that we just didn't have time to vertically integrate.

26:14We've learned very quickly that supply chain is probably the biggest challenge in this industry, hence vertically integrating more. We've learned that sometimes what suppliers say is true is not actually true. This is interesting because your co-founder, Max, comes from SpaceX. And I think they have this, you keep using the word vertically integrated, they have this thing where they do that all in-house themselves. So I guess you kind of probably have that tradition you want to copy, I guess. We do, but I will say the nuance that Max brought over from SpaceX, and just so you know what, SpaceX, Max was the guy who would take a given part and figure out, we made one of these, how do we go make one a day or one a month, right?

26:46Like the high rate manufacturing. And one of the things that he brought over from SpaceX was this DNA and this mentality of, we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We don't want to vertically integrate. We're only going to do it if we have to. Now, the reality is, similar to SpaceX, we pretty much have to do almost all of it over time. That doesn't mean we have to start by doing it all. So as we scale up and as we grow, we're going to vertically integrate more and be very strategic about the parts that we bring in. Very interesting. And stepping back to the market as a whole again, overall,$34 billion spent a year on these types of buses.

27:18Some of them on the giant platforms. More shifting over to the area you're focused on. Where's this market going to be in 2030, 2035? Obviously, Starship's supposed to make it even easier to get to space. Maybe Elon lowers the price a little bit with that or something to create more volume. Like, how much more stuff is going to be going up there? And is there room up there for it all? Well, I'll tell you what our friends in China are doing. They've announced plans to launch a constellation of 13 ,000 government satellites in the coming few years. Not even 2030, but before 2030. This is without reusable rockets.

27:48It's whatever they have, right? So, of course, they're trying to copy exactly what SpaceX is doing. So, they want to get there. I keep seeing, like, slight failures. But I guess eventually they'll figure it out. Slight failures is pretty generous. I see a failure and it's a giant explosion. but you know yes no they keep not it's like they're almost gonna they may get it so they might they might but they've announced plans to go do this and that's what they publicly have talked about so what i would just say is like if the trend and those are chinese government satellites not some commercial company in china yeah and if they want to go do that and i look at how many satellites the u.s government was able to launch last year not how many they wanted to but they were only able to launch according to the data that we've been able to pull 146 and i look at that discrepancy and i'm like we are in multiple orders of magnitude off well because i'm catching up elon has how many up there for starlink do we think and those are commercial right but he launches about 2 000 per year 2 000 a year so china's trying to ramp up to be ahead of where spacex yes i think it's probably like an ego thing or something of course no it definitely is right it's a thousand percent that being said there's a ton of space up there so like the analogy that i like to make is right like um uh if you're on the 101 freeway right driving between i don't know let's say like Palo Alto and San Francisco, the number of cars that are on that freeway over the course of like a single hour period are more than all of the satellites in orbit.

29:07Wow. And they're on that one little freeway, like over that, like what 30 mile stretch versus you look at the vastness of space. We have a lot of room up there. No, of course. I mean, people realize how big an ocean is. Space is even, it's a, it's out of part of the spheres. It's like practically infinite space for what, for the purposes of what you're doing. Exactly. Now, if there, if there were to be, God forbid, We had a war and satellites each split into like 20 ,000 pieces and we're each flying around. Would that at some point have enough stuff that it would start causing problems? Certainly, right?

29:34And that's absolutely a risk. And that's why we want to avoid going into a situation where we have these, you know, capabilities in space where we're shooting down other satellites. I'd much rather use electronic warfare or cyber attacks or things like that. Better turn them off than to blow them up. Exactly. Because if you blow them up, you might hurt yourself, right? Because things are going to go everywhere. It's hard to track really small pieces. and bad things can happen. Elon should be supporting electronic warfare. It's their preferred method. Yes. That is definitely our preferred method.

30:03That being said, though, I'm sure you're tracking the Golden Dome and all these initiatives. Of course. What is Golden Dome? Tell me our listeners. The way that I view Golden Dome, I'm curious how you see Golden Dome, because we're still defining the details, is it's effectively the shield over the U.S. and potentially our allies as well, where if something is trying to penetrate that shield, whether it be a hypersonic glide vehicle or ICBM or some other type of missile. We have the ability to spot the threat, understand where the threat is going, and then intercept and destroy that threat. I think another way of looking at it is the Iron Dome is what was built to do this for Israel, of course, and has been very successful overall.

30:37And the Golden Dome is the same for the US, and it's golden because it's Trump's. And a little bigger. And a little bigger. And a little bigger. Which we shouldn't actually probably say, because I think it should be nonpartisan, hopefully. I agree. Because it'd It'd be nice if everyone wanted just to defend us against ICBMs. Yes. And see, that's the thing that I really try to hammer home with people about Golden Dome. This should be something that is not the left or the right. I mean, North Korea has multiple times had their leaders threaten Palo Alto because, you know, Perry was working against them in the Defense Department and now teaches at Stanford.

31:09So there's multiple reasons all of us are probably going to want this to work. Exactly. And if you really look at it, right, this is a no-brainer. Like, of course we want to defend the U.S. I will give you like the counter just because I think it's always worth having a devil's advocate here. I am a fan of the Golden Dome. There's a lot of theorists who say that when one side has like is getting super dominant, like technological supremacy, it actually puts things out of balance and it forces the other side to like strike in other ways because otherwise they know they're not going to be able to have a counter anymore.

31:38and like so if you assume that everyone is like in a dark forest and fighting each other if one side's proven it can completely defend itself then it has the ability to like force the other side as its boss and annihilate it which is very scary for the other side so i i don't know if you've thought about these things at all it's interesting and i will say that i think there's a lot of other initiatives outside of just golden dome that we should focus on and we probably are focusing on and some we'll talk about and some we won't talk about i will say when i see the reaction to Golden Dome, though, from near-peer adversaries, right?

32:10They're terrified of it. They're terrified, right? The CCP spokeswoman came out and was like, this is terrible. And I'm like, okay, that's like the protesters. It's like, we did it. We did it, guys. It's probably a good thing that they don't like the way we're defending ourselves. Especially because China is building a lot of nukes, unfortunately, right now, which is a terrifying conversation. But so putting that aside for a second, it's the Golden Dome itself. Obviously, you need a lot of things on the ground, a lot of things in space. You need to watch everything in space. Yes. I mean, in theory, you have things in space to go down and stop things coming up.

32:40This is things. Yep. And you're going to need a lot more satellites. So this is obviously something you guys are going to be helping. Good for Apex. Yes. Good for Apex. Good for the country. So the way we see it is there's two key parts. One is how do you see everything that's happening, which is missile tracking, missile detection, and then understanding basically how you want to go intercept that satellite, right? Which is something called fire control. Then the other side of it is, and this is what Trump talked about in his executive order, is what we call space-based interceptors. And this is the idea that in space, you have an interceptor that is able to, when a missile is identified, deploy that interceptor and eliminate, whether that be in space or which we call exo-atmospheric or endo-atmospheric, which is in the atmosphere.

33:22So right now, David's sling is a certain part of the Iron Dome that actually intercepts Iranian ballistic missiles outside of the atmosphere. Those currently are fired from ships and things from the ground. Exactly. That's like the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors. Exactly. So those are, or THAAD is another one, right, that the U.S. deployed in Israel. Those do exo-atmospheric interceptions. And if you've seen the videos posted on Twitter or others, they're actually pretty beautiful. It's like a beautiful firework when they intercept it. It is pretty fantastic to see. Those are actually happening in space.

33:52And so the idea is to build some of these things on satellites themselves to launch from there. Exactly. Because guess what? but then you're right next to where it's going to be intercepted. It's much easier to do that interception. So doing that exoatmospheric interception, it's already happening. But if you're doing it from space, you can actually do it much more cheaply and much more reliably if those assets are already lingering in space instead of needing to track from the ground and then basically aim perfectly, make sure there's no failures, and then hit that thing. Do you think there's any chance we'll be using any forms of direct energy?

34:21I obviously spend a lot of time with that press on turning things off. The microwave blasts, which works miles away, you can actually disable the steering on something. You can hit it with a laser, especially once you know where it's going to be exactly. Is that kind of stuff, is that too far away? Or what are your thoughts on that? No, I think it's going to be, there's no one size fits all, right? And this is probably the biggest misnomer about Golden Dome. If someone thinks, oh, we're going to put a couple of missiles up there and then we're good. The reality is for different types of threats, you need to intercept them in different ways.

34:47And for different stages of the threat, right? Are you in boost phase or coast phase or something else? How are you going to intercept it? So whether it's directed energy, whether it's cyber attacks, or whether it's a kinetic or energetic interception, those are all, like, it's all the above. It's not one or the other. I guess in cyber attack, they'd be particularly cruel as to break into it and turn it back around. That would be pretty neat. Maybe, maybe. Cruel are just very smart, right? I mean, that's probably the most - Fire at us is going to hit you, so don't fire at us. No, these things are - It saves us a missile, right?

35:17That's very efficient. It is interesting, because you're talking about how when people do satellites now, there's like new ones every year. Golden Dome is going to have new parts of it every year in order to stay ahead of the adversary, because it's a little bit of a cat and mouse game, right? To keep building new capabilities that they're going to try to get around. Exactly. Exactly. It's not something where you can just say, hey, we did it once. It's up there. It's working. And that's why this whole idea of proliferation and attritability, especially in low Earth orbit, is really started again like five plus years ago.

35:43But it's really becoming the cornerstone of how the DoD, the Space Force and our allies are thinking about things. You're talking about low Earth orbit. Let's educate our listeners a little bit, too. We have LEO, MEO, I think GEO. What do these mean? And what are the different advantages of each? So the simplest way to think about it is how far away from Earth are they? So low Earth orbit, LEO, you're somewhere between, call it 400 and 1200 kilometers away from Earth, which is actually pretty close, right? Like you think about that distance just going straight up. That's not that far away. And what that means is because you're close to Earth, for things where they want to look down at Earth, or you want to intercept a missile, it's really well located because you're going to be really near the thing that you're looking for um then you could go into mio mio is a huge range right mio is anything from call it uh 12 1400 kilometers away up to tens of thousands of kilometers away and so mio there's no air resistance does low earth orbit have a tiny bit of air or not really not really the atmosphere where does the atmosphere stop around 400 so the atmosphere will stop actually a bit lower than that right so we have some satellites that fly in what we call v leo very low earth orbit and that could be pretty much like 300 kilometers 200 kilometers or less and that you're really dealing with atmosphere like a tiny bit of atmosphere but in some cases depending on how low you go a lot right you have to do with atomic like atox atomic oxygen which like corrodes things some people always try to take in the oxygen use it somehow but then you're probably breaking this thing over time exactly and then what happens is because you're in that you're in a much tougher environment it's more expensive to have a payload work etc so we've uh kind of uh our architecture as a nation has really decided that low earth orbit is very interesting.

37:19VLEO is enticing, but still more science projects. Tough and messy. And then what goes to mid-earth orbit? So then, yeah, mid-earth orbit, you have a nice middle ground, right? Because you're higher up, so you could see more of the earth from where you are. So you need less satellites to do what you're doing. When you're in LEO, keep in mind, you're so close to earth, you need a lot more satellites to cover the whole earth. Yeah, the middle earth, if you're trying to like watch the whole earth, I remember I've seen these pictures from the D-class side of like looking at earth you still want things like really far away to see the whole thing exactly but then it's hard to zoom in right so that's your trade-off so really the right architecture is you probably want a little bit of everything uh so mio is kind of that middle ground right where it's you're higher up so you could see more of it you're further away though so it's harder to see the details of what you want and it's a little bit harder to communicate is it harder to shoot you down there too uh in theory because it's further away the problem with mio though is it's the toughest of all radiation environments so you're in this uh kind of awkward middle ground where you're just pummeled constantly with radiation.

38:16Why is it a middle ground? Why is it worse than being farther away? So basically, it has to do with like where the Van Allen belt is and how Earth's magnetic field is basically pushing away the radiation. And this is where we exceed my exact knowledge, but essentially that middle ground is where it's hit the worst. And then if you go above that, you go to what you call geo, which is geosynchronous orbit. That's very interesting so that is as the earth rotates you're high enough to rotate at the same cadence so you stay over the same spot the entire exactly so if you're really curious about a single point on earth you probably want to park your satellite over there the problem is at that point you're like 30 000 kilometers away so you're not really seeing what's going on in great detail exactly you really or you need a huge satellite that could zoom way in right think of it i guess the government might secretly have and not supposed to talk about exactly so when we think about those billion to our satellites, most of them are in geo.

39:08Then they're trying to, yeah, who knows, but they may be very big telescopes. Right. Exactly. Watching, watching the roof very closely. They see me walk outside. Exactly. Um, so, but the right architecture to be frank, it's not, Oh, let's do everything in Leo or Mio or geo it's, you want all of the above. So if you think about it, you probably want something in geo getting a high level picture, right? Then you want something in Mio that can basically, you're zooming in a little more, but you still see a lot. then you probably want to task the satellites that are in low earth orbit to then zoom in even more, make the final determination and let's say fire an interceptor or things like that.

39:43So the point is, it's not a one versus the other versus the other. It's actually how does everything cohesively work together. And going back to like the geopolitics of it, this is all for defense, of course. Obviously, that could be useful against some of like the terrorists, Islamist terrorist states, if someone bad running Russia, doing crazy things, stopping them. But really, China is like the adversary that unfortunately we have to be most concerned about and trying to do this as well. Is China trying to steal your IP at all? Have you caught them doing this at all? Like, like what's, what's your view on what they're doing with our, with our sector and companies like you?

40:15Yes. So, um, let's put it this way. Um, we've had some very interesting job applicants come by, uh, that we haven't interviewed. We, um, due to the nature of our work, we can only hire us persons, but that doesn't mean people still don't try to sneak in or we, we catch some things that are not quite adding up. And then we've had suppliers reach out about, oh, I'm a great machine shop. I do this. And we dig in a little bit and we're like, you are not who you say you are. And I can't go into too many details because we actually, we report all those things. We actually work very closely both with the State Department, FBI and others on all of this.

40:50But yes, it's, let's just say constantly, like every day there's something interesting. Yeah. And I guess this is what they've done very, very well in other industries. Obviously, So, you know, at Palantir, we'd catch them in the old days trying to steal stuff. And it was interesting. The thing that really I've mentioned before, but it shocked me was there's people we knew and trusted from PhD programs who are working with us. And then it seems like they returned by the fact that they had family in China, which is really bothersome to me because it's like an American citizen you trust. You want to work with a lot of the best people I work with of Chinese origin.

41:20But because they had close family in China, they were able to like then force them to steal. So you have to like watch this closely. if someone, you know, if they're a citizen, if they have family there, right? Yep. I mean, they're effectively being blackmailed, right? Like I feel, I feel terrible for them, right? It's not, it's like, it's just because they happen to have family there, they're susceptible and it's really hard. Yeah. It does seem like the space area is the one area where America is just like pretty far ahead of China right now. It's probably a pretty big advantage. I guess they'd be scrambling right now.

41:47Yes. I do think we are, we are far ahead. That being said, I think that because China has the advantage of the public and private markets are won there, they can move at a pace that is slightly different than here, right? So if they decide they want to go do some initiative, they could put unlimited money or resources towards that instantly, right? They could turn entire factories into building what they want to build. So when we think about, you know, you could go read science fiction or read about the original kind of Star Wars concept or things like that. But let's say China wanted to go do that.

42:21I guarantee you they could get that to orbit and test it a lot faster than we could just because there's no red tape for them to jump through. For us, right, like even now, to get your license to fly a satellite. And that's not just Apex. That's Starlink has to go through the same thing. Elon has to go through this to launch Starship still, right? You need to go through the licensing process, get your approval, like make every agency happy, get a thumbs up. I remember he was talking, there'd be like a random lady somewhere in Florida who worked out of the office. It was just if she's in a bad mood that week, she's just not going to sign your thing and stamp it.

42:55Right. Yeah. Or it's like, oh, you know what? Like, we all decided to take this week off and we're like, OK, but we're going to like that doesn't work. I don't understand how we can do that. So you look at some of these things on like this goes back to like the government efficiency aspect. It's like, yes, we want things to be more efficient. Like, absolutely. No, we absolutely. And it's really good to have some really strong leaders in the DoD right now who are prioritizing this. I think I'm very excited to see them pushing it forward. China, you're right, has this authoritarian side. But I think we have innovators who are actually maybe even better.

43:27And right now, at least, they're in charge. So, hopefully, we can get them to push it hard. 1 ,000%. And you have companies like Apex in the U.S., so lucky for us. I will say, though, to your point on leaders in the DoD, there are some, I mean, not just some, but so many fantastic people. And even you look at General Gutline, who's in charge of Golden Dome. And when I heard that he was becoming the Golden Dome czar, as Trump called him, it was like my smile was just massive because he is one of those thought leaders that can just push things forward. And there's so many others, too. So I think we have a really good shot at succeeding here.

43:58I want to end on an optimistic note that takes things away from the defense side for a second, which is it's very optimistic that we're doing this competently. Hopefully it means we have peace. What are some of the possibilities in space that excite you the most that have nothing to do with defense? So I would say there's a lot. Some of them are on the realm of like, what can we do if we are moving beyond just Earth? And I think there's some elements where we move humankind beyond Earth, like to Mars, like Elon Musk or somewhere else. Those are exciting. But even in the interim, things like asteroid mining, right?

44:27I want to be able to go like have fleets of satellites that go to these asteroids and get these rare earth metals and like bring them back in abundance to Earth, right? Like how, like all the science fiction books, all the Asimov books, all of those that I would go read. Like I want those to become reality. I saw something the other day. There was like some asteroid that's like not too far away that has like 700 quintillion dollars worth of gold or something on it. Which obviously you take the gold market, but yeah, you take the gold market. But, and this is where I think people misunderstand.

44:55Gold is actually really useful as a metal. Like you actually could build a lot of things out of gold and they would be much cheaper, right? Exactly. So that's how I think about it. It's not so much like, let me get a bunch of gold and dump it on the market. It's like, here's all these rare earth metals that we need to build our phones and our cars and whatever it is. If we have that in abundance, everything should be cheaper and better. And everybody should be able to have these technology and these devices. Yeah, there's probably not going to be a scarcity of stuff if you go up into space for that.

45:21If you did have to live somewhere in space, where would you want to live? Oh, that's a good one. Like permanently? Or just maybe for a year? For a year? I mean, for a year, honestly, it probably wouldn't be the space station because that thing is cramped but if i knew i could come back from mars i would go to mars in a heartbeat i think that'd be fun to go to mars the one-way trip would be tough though i don't know if i could do the one-way trip i hear there's like lots of ice on the moon and i feel like i feel like it's just because it's shorter and faster it'd be kind of fun to go up there and play some sports and have a hotel that that would be cool if you go resort if you don't like the cold though that's my problem right like you turn into water then you're dead anyway yeah it's gonna be the real temperature just turn on the ac i love it thanks for joining us today thanks joe it's great to be here We'll be right back.