Precision Cargo Delivery From Space | Justin Fiaschetti, Inversion

32:25Or maybe rather, we certainly do probably in every single decision, but I could not tell you the counterfactual because we haven't been in that environment to go and actually run through those decisions. Yeah, it's not a factor in our decision making. So for example, we have one parachute, one main parachute that we have, and we don't have a backup parachute. And that is an intentional decision that the reliability meets our targeted reliability. But SpaceX did not have that luxury, right? NASA required redundant parachutes or skydivers, as an example, always have their backup parachute just in case.

33:03We don't need to have that. So maybe that's a good answer to your question of like... You're able to keep costs lower and then make it like a simpler system. A lot simpler. Yeah. So I know you basically said, I think it's something like right now, even with a distributed set of bases and all these different things, it's like a five to six hour lead time before you can actually get some piece of cargo to some place without, you know, from space, like payload delivery. How much infrastructure is this replacing? A lot. I think that there's a world that overseas bases are purely for political reasons rather than operational reasons.

33:45And probably 30 years from now. And do you know how much infrastructure that is? Tens to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Yeah, it is the vast majority of the DoD's, you know, a large amount of the DoD's budget is in operations and maintenance. right o m funding not necessarily the funding to actually go buy the new system but rather maintain it uh uh keep it operational distribute around the globe um and uh yeah i think i think that like more than anybody can conceive right now is going to get replaced by this how many of these do you think you're going to need in orbit uh once you know you aren't constrained by just launch windows and all that stuff and everything is kind of fleshed out are you going to have like hundreds of these or thousands in orbit yeah i think we'll probably get to the place where we have single digit thousands to you know low tens of thousands um once you get to that level you actually want to switch to a different like concept of operations it no longer then makes sense to have tons of distributed vehicles but rather it makes more sense to start to centralized cargo in singular locations with multiple vehicles that can deliver a selected cargo.

35:09But that's still decades away. I think that the part of the problem, like you can imagine like hundreds of space stations, all with like being a warehouse with the delivery vehicles that fly off, right? The problem is you can't start there. If you start, you don't have enough cargo, you don't have enough budget there is not like their constraints there are constraints that make it more advantageous to start with the delivery vehicle being the host vehicle because it allows you to scale in less step change ways right you can kind of continuously launch new vehicles rather than having to put you know a whole bet on a little bit a little bit more like the starlink satellites where you can just do version one version two version three and you only start really, really scaling up once you have something that's like absolutely fantastic.

36:02Yeah. I mean, I think, I think SpaceX totally would have flown thousands of V1 star links if they hadn't made V2 better already. Right. And that's kind of how we will, we will work. More so like you don't have a big Amazon distribution center until there's a city's worth of demand for those types of goods. And so rather you start off with a single CVS, right? And it's much easier to scale single CVSs than it is to scale massive distribution centers. Maybe that analogy is a bit stretched, but we'll probably see thousands to tens of thousands of these in orbit so when you talked about the behavior change I'd imagine that it's not only how people kind of operate in the field but it's also like getting people to decide that this is a like known quantity and that this is even accessible or possible in the first place what was it kind of like trying to like educate people on here's what this can do here's what it can't do like maybe it doesn't deliver humans but here's what it can do in the first place yeah well I mean with any new technology right you have your adoption curve you have to run through.

37:20And one of the first stops on that curve is education, right? Before you get to full adoption. And so, you know, we were fortunate to be able to kind of ground our vehicles and our operations in that of airdrops, right? People are used to calling in cargo and having it delivered by aircraft or cargo, you know, or whatever system they want to deliver. And so we were fortunate enough to be able to be like, you know, we basically talk about how we're not really a space company, right? Like we are a space company in the same way that like Nike is an internet company. Like, yes, they use the internet to sell their products and market their products.

38:04But fundamentally, they're an athletics brand or a lifestyle brand, depending on what you think. And we just happen to use space, right? Like the only reason we use space is because that is the best way to get access to the globe. If we could do it by tunneling, we probably would do it by tunneling. And so when we talk to customers, you know, hey, that requirement you have of being able to respond to the conflict when and wherever it breaks out, you know, right now you're fulfilling that, you know, with aircraft and et cetera, et cetera. What if you added this to it? What if you added the ability to come from space?

38:37And, you know, from your perspective or from the operator's perspective, they're calling in an airdrop or they're calling in, you know, whatever. ever, but it's just going to come from space instead of the airplane. But there's no difference in how that works to start. And so to start, we try to see how we can be better, faster, cheaper in today, in current operations. And then as people start to understand that, we can then start to talk about now that you have that as a reliable function, here are the other things you don't need to do that you're currently doing. Or here are the new things you could do that you're not able to do today.

39:19And I think that's really where people's eyes start to light up and they start to see like, oh, this is not just an increment. This will rewrite fundamentally how we think about accessing the globe and transportation around the globe in the same way a century ago the aircraft did. Yeah. And has there been any missions over the past like 20-ish years where if there had been like rapid access to supplies in under an hour things would have turned out differently in a way that they they didn't i think that uh there there are countless examples of this in uh especially across like the war on terror where people were not able to be supported when they needed that support and that led to a poor outcome.

40:05Like unnecessary deaths or things like that? It could be that. It could be, you know, there's examples of that. There are examples of the mission failing. There are examples of it being more expensive than it needed to, right? Having to send in extra resources and support. A way to think about it is what would the last 20 years have looked like if we didn't have aircraft? And like the answer is kind of like, it would be fundamentally different. It would be totally different. Like, uh, we would, we would, we would be, it's hard. It would be back as if it were world war one or earlier. Right. And so, um, what does a, you know, what does a, uh, civil war battle look like that an aircraft is plopped into just changes everything completely different, right?

40:59It is a fundamental, uh, mismatch in forces and technology. There's kind of the, I don't know, there's a bunch of YouTube videos that are like fun of like, what if an F-22 went up against Napoleon's army or something like that, right? And like, you know, they're a little absurd, but it's the, it's asking the question of what if, what if you had such great technical overmatch, how would that change? And what usually the conclusion is, is like the technical overmatch is so great. It doesn't even make sense to fight like a landslide victory it doesn't even make sense to even try to engage it right because like what are you going to do throw a spear at an f-22 or you know shoot it with a cannon like you're not right um and so uh it's hard to do the counterfactual of what would it look like if you know you can do specifics of oh here is where we could have delivered life-saving supplies or mission critical supplies that would have changed the outcome but fundamentally the entire any conflict would be completely different um with that is china trying to build some sort of similar system or are we kind of the only country that's doing it um china has active space planes um it's not a far stretch to make a bunch of them and put them in orbit do you think in like a hypothetical future conflict this would give us like a significant advantage on that front 100 100%.

42:25It gives an advantage to every single branch of the military, right? In every single domain of operation, being able to be supported by the space domain is a force multiplier, right? It's hard to conceive of a world where deliveries to the battlefield aren't happening from space or to remote teams or, you know, to the middle of the ocean, right? It's too fast and too good of a capability for that to not exist. The only reasonable argument against that existing is cost. And right now, the cost makes sense for a vast, vast array of missions and cargo and effects. But like we talked about earlier, costs are coming down substantially in the launch industry.

43:30And costs come down with any technology curve. And so to bet against the imperious nature of cost reduction of technology is like a fool's errand. And so it is reasonable to debate if between 2022 and 2026, or maybe 2025, if the costs bore the value that delivery would have. And from everything we've looked at, the answer was always yes. But you can ask the question. So once you get towards the end of this decade in the early 2030s, which, you know, we're closer and closer and closer, we're four years away. It's impossible to argue that it's not. Some companies decide to vertically integrate a lot more than others.

44:27How have you kind of thought about that? And like, what has been the process for deciding which which parts to vertically integrate and not? Yeah. So we try to vertically integrate everything. So our Ray spacecraft, we built practically everything in-house. Everything from the tanks for the propellant to the separation system that connected us to Falcon 9, to the parachute system, to the engine, to the software, the avionics, the solar panels, the list goes on and on. What's the logic behind doing that? Yeah, so there's a couple reasons we do that.

45:01But the first was, you know, the first reason we do vertical integration is because it results in a better product. The supply base is not robust enough such that you have infinitely granular options of subcomponents, right? Like there are discrete components you can go and buy, right? There's a discrete number of valves that exist. Some things literally just don't exist. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Some things don't exist, or some things you could make work, right? But when you have to make a could work decision across thousands of components, you end up with a flawed or not as good for the customer product.

45:43Less optimized. Yeah, it's a less optimized product. It has more compromises baked into every subcomponent because maybe this one's slightly bigger than we want, but that's fine. We'll deal with it. Well, now we have to deal with it with this and with that and with that. That's like one thing. But the other is really around supply chain and time and cost, which is if you want like a valve, a certain valve today, it's 18 months, right? Like there are, when we went out to get parachutes for our vehicle, it was going to be three years and millions of dollars. And so we said, well, we can build those.

46:22Let's go hire the team and buy the sewing machines. And now we make our own parachutes. And it allows for this iteration cycle at the core, the deepest level of the product that influences the rest of the product. And so I think it's smart to not vertically integrate in industries where your supply base is also moving as fast or faster than you are. The electronics and consumer electronics industry is a great place to show this. No startup is going to build batteries faster and iterate on 18650 cells faster than the general supply chain is going to. BYD or Tesla or... Or Panasonic or Samsung. But when there is a singular parachute supplier in the United States that doesn't care about

47:15new companies, that doesn't frankly care about innovating, because why the hell should they? They have all the contracts, right? There's no incentive for them to move quickly. And there's no incentive for them to meet a startup's demands and needs. Timelines or a cost. Exactly. So that's the early reasons, right? Which is we do it because it makes a better first product and it lets us control our timelines, our costs, and our iteration in the development cycle for us faster. As we get into production, though, that's where it really shines. which is you can switch from, okay, now I have a really great product that's been optimized around the customer needs to now I can optimize every single component within that to be as cheap and as easy to manufacture as possible.

48:05And I can eliminate components and I can combine components. Like as an example, in like automotive, in traditional automotive, a lot of car companies are not car manufacturers, but are car assemblers, right? They get the center console from one company and they get the door switch, you know, the - I think that Boeing has like 747 has something like, or Boeing has like 120 ,000 suppliers or some crazy number like that. Something like that. Yeah. And like staying in the automotive world, you have a computer that controls the center screen and you have a computer that controls the light switches.

48:43And so they can't talk to each other. And so you have redundancy that you can't eliminate, right? But when you have a full understanding of your whole product and full control over all of them, you can start to do things like, well, what if I didn't need a controller on my motor, but I could build that into my avionics system? And that's probably not the right decision to start. And for example, a lot of our motors have a built-in controller. But eventually, you can move towards that. So then now you can use a cheaper motor. And then we'll go through and say, like, a few iterations in the future, how much cost can we get down?

49:17Yeah. And then the final reason we do that is around reliability of supply chain. So we are, our missions are highly binary in the fact that they launch at a launch date. Every single system has to be ready to go and has to be integrated in the vehicle at the date we need to integrate onto the rocket. And so you can't really have one system that lags behind. If one system lags behind, the whole vehicle lags behind. And so we've run into this countless times where a supplier is delayed. And now it's like that's delayed by six months. They're the only supplier. One part delays the entire production.

50:01Yeah, is our whole company delayed by six months? And we don't want to have to have that as a risk item in the business. And so where there are robust supply chains with multiple vendors that are moving quickly, that are supported by other industries, such as batteries, as a great example, we're not going to touch those, right? Maybe we'll assemble our own battery pack because we need the form and function of a certain thing, but we're not going to do our own cell level. um but when you start to get into these highly you you are now a derivative of your supplier right if your supplier is slow you're slow if if the parachute manufacturer decides that they their army contract is more important then you're fucked up on the wrong side of the bed and you're going to be delayed by six months okay you know what do they care right you're a small fish and so So the best way to avoid that is to build your own.

50:55So going back to like the super early days, you know, you talked about basically trying to go out, find vendors to fill all these needs. And then, you know, three years or 18 months for some of the parts. What was it like at the beginning? Because I imagine you're trying to do as little as you can to actually make something work or just to start. How do you kind of change philosophy over time? Yeah. Well, I think there are examples where you can solve that problem with money. And that can work quite well. Going out and saying, I don't want to build anything. I'm just going to buy it from a supplier or from a satellite bus provider or something like that can work quite well.

51:35And it does to a lot of degree. But now you don't have that experience of building. Your company is not built around building. Your company is built around assembling. And so you aren't building those muscles. You aren't building the processes. You aren't building the culture. You aren't hiring the people focused on deep level, high quality iteration and design. And so early on, we knew that ARC was the place we needed to get to. and Ray was the way to get there. And so the purpose of Ray, like if we just bought Ray, it wouldn't have served the function, right? If we literally purchased the vehicle and flew it, it wouldn't have done anything for the business.

52:21You're not building any muscle memory, yeah. Or processes or testing or anything like that, right? And so the decision to bring in house versus go out of house, part of it is we check, hey, could we get this, right? Because some things we don't need to have a core competency in, right? Like we don't need a core competency to start in solenoid valves. A solenoid valve is going to work as a solenoid valve is going to work. And like your main optimization for that is cost, which we don't super care about early on because, you know, it's$800 instead of$100. And like you can stomach that early on for a one-off vehicle and you'll bring those in-house later.

53:00But where we know we need a core competency, it's inconceivable to me to hand that off to another company, right? Where your core business doesn't function if you don't have that other component or that other supplier or other vendor. That's a weird place to be for me. And I think it makes a lot of sense to build that in-house. Yeah, especially with this sort of thing where the launch windows are incredibly important and having things ready in case you can ship just a little bit faster is super important. How are you thinking about like planning a few months, years into the future and figuring out which things do you need, you know, in this warehouse, whereas maybe you can just get a moment of?

53:43Yeah. Well, the great thing about the team we've hired is it's a very decentralized decision making process on that. And we specifically hire a team that understands those problems, has experience in those problems, and has full ownership of their systems. So when the responsible engineer for the flaps on the back of the vehicle is designing the system and is looking at that, he's looking at, well, what is the lead time for the actuators? What is the lead time for the materials? All of that. And that's happening early in the conceptual design of the vehicle. And that is rolling up then to the overarching vehicle level timeline.

54:30That's understanding, okay, these actuators are going to be a three-month lead time, but then they need six months of testing or whatever. And you're able to back it out from there versus like, okay, we know we can buy standard screws or lock wire we can buy whenever. And so we try to identify what are the long lead items that are high risk that we need to make sure we are manufacturing fully in-house or we have multiple vendors for, or we have like, you know, ordered it early enough that we can pivot if we need to, right? So we try to make sure that the team and the individual engineers on the team have that full scope of ownership and can hold their full system and all of the design, build, and test that goes into it in context at all times, right?

55:30So we try to keep a very lean and talent-dense team because the goal is that the whole team should be able to hold the whole context of the vehicle in their head at any given time. So that if you ask an avionics engineer why they've made the decision to go with this sensor, they can say something like, well, the parachute needs to have this amount of accuracy. And as such, this has driven my decision-making. If you look at big defense primes and how they design their systems traditionally, that context holding is replaced by detailed requirements. Not like make sure you have everything organized, but like you are going to have this very specific load requirement on your structural beam.

56:22And it's going to go in this force direction. And you have a mass budget and a material allocation. and like, this is how you're going to design this bracket. The problem is that takes like a decade to develop just the requirements, let alone the actual design. And so when we're trying to ride the bike as we're building it, it's important that everybody on the team is constantly making decisions with context from other systems and are communicating across systems and are empowered to have those, like have the right to make a decision as needed so you try to keep the team kind of like artificially small for the first you know four-ish years before you had something where you were sending it to orbit um I think we kept the team at the level that it needed to be I don't know if it's artificially small or not I mean it's way fucking smaller than any other team I've I've heard of you know we were 25 people building the entire vehicle in-house you know we I think we had beside we had like a couple software engineers but every single subsystem was single threaded right like but that's all that was needed so I I don't know why a bigger team it wouldn't have necessarily helped you move faster or I think there would have been some benefits if we had a few extra people but I like it's this weird thing we're like I don't know why everybody else needs such a big team like yeah i don't understand that um and i think that kind of goes to like the folks we've hired here are incredibly dedicated incredibly excited we try to screen for people who we could see as future founders right that that are driven for a by a purpose bigger than themselves with a creativity and a decision-making capability that can be independent of any sort of...

58:20You don't have to be told what to do. Totally. You're kind of like intuitively just trying to figure a solution. Exactly. You're expected to not be told what to do. If you are being told what to do, that's a huge problem within a company. So how have you been screening for that? What traits are you looking for? Well, you want to try an interview question? Sure. Go for it. Okay. So I'll give you this is a two part question. The first part, I'll tell you the second part after the first part. I want you to just choose two random things in the office. Like, you know, choose them. Tell me what they are.

58:55Sure. Forklift thing. And then I don't know that table. OK, so we have a forklift and a table. So what I want you to do is come up with three products, ideas, companies, whatever, inspired by, based on, or thought of from those two items. So it could be, for example, a standing desk that can also be used to raise up as a podium that you could stand on for giving a talk to the team. So something like that. An IKEA warehouse. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What's been the most interesting responses that you've gotten with that question? So the fun part about it is it is totally different depending on what people choose.

59:43And so like there's no there's no like actual like right answer to those questions. And frankly, like it's kind of a silly question and the ideas are not meant to be serious in any way. This is one of those questions that's like, hey, tell me how you think. Right. And I'm not screening And it's fundamentally independent of anybody's role or background or skill set or technical skill set. It's purely a question of like, can you think of random things in a relatively high pressure setting being an interview? And, you know, where does your mind go and what connections do you make? because like decision making and problem solving is just about like random context and being able to use that random context to uh find a way through the problem um and this is a similar thing which is like i don't fucking know what like what am i going to make between a table and a forklift or a scissor lift like uh i guess i could use the material and make a you know a wooden forklift that comes in an ikea box to lift a you know clock onto the wall or something um Um, uh, but like consistently the folks that are like, are like, I'm completely blown away by their performance here.

1:01:02Crush that question. It's the, it's the create, like it's, it's a, uh, uh, and maybe it's anecdotal and maybe I'm just remembering those specifically, but, um, yeah, I like that. And then it's fun to just kind of chat about it, iterate on it. You know, when, when you do find those people that are incredibly creative, think on their their feet, they can be future founder types. What kind of control or latitude are you trying to give them so that they can kind of do their best work while here? Well, the thing I say, so whenever someone starts, we do onboarding and I'll talk to them and kind of go through and tell them about the culture and the company.

1:01:40And I always say like my job as the CEO is to give you the direction you need to run in and then unblock you so you can run as fast as you possibly want. to systematically unfuck people yeah like basically like like what's your problem that is blocking you from being as great as you could be um and we found that you know it's important to have and make sure people know what direction they're running because when you have creative ambitious people they they will run and you got like in it in in the system of a company it needs to be aligned with where everybody else you need to make sure that everyone has the why in the back of their minds while they're just running at full speed.

1:02:18Exactly. And then remove the roadblocks. And like a lot of that is like administrative and like bureaucracy based, right? Making sure to eliminate unnecessary red tape, if you will. But some of it could be as simple as like making sure we have enough machines to manufacture prototypes of their hardware so they can test it quickly. Yeah. And I always try to tell people like, I want you to run as fast as you possibly can. Right. And if you're ever blocked or slowed down, like, let me know and we'll figure out whatever that might be. Yeah. And consistently, the team has just been crushing it. You know, if you fast forward a few years and you've put a bunch of these things in orbit, what are you going to be basically focused on at that point?

1:03:06you know once we have kind of our first fleet of vehicles on orbit um i i think the big thing we're going to be focused on is scale right is how do you scale up production and how do you get to the scale that you need to are you going to try to do that in the us here oh absolutely yeah well i don't know if it'll be in la but it will definitely be domestic like not only do i want it to be but It has to be. And so that will be a big deal is how fast can we scale and how much can we drop the costs of these vehicles? The market for this is infinitely elastic, is my point of view. And so any cost reduction results in a greater than that increase in the market by a ton.

1:03:54And so it will be about scaling production and getting that production to be as efficient as possible. I think that's going to be the number one thing for us. Yeah. I remember hearing, I was reading like Elon's biography that Walter Isaacson did. And I think Elon had this before the first few, like the first actual orbital launch. He was talking with his team and he was basically saying every day that we delay is like$10 million in future revenue that doesn't get unlocked because we delayed by one day. And so we should be constantly like running this, you know, make if we can mess, uh, undo some issue today and it costs a hundred thousand dollars, it may make sense to do that and pay for it, uh, just to make the 10 million happen a little sooner.

1:04:39Um, for you on like speeding things up, what is, what is your process for basically making things happen faster that shouldn't be possible? Yeah. Well, I think that like the easy answer is like, and kind of most obvious answer is usually like spend money. um like the elon quotes a reasonable first pass at like looking at that um most of the time though that uh spending money uh or maybe necessarily spending money indicates that you are doing a thing which might be wrong like it might be faster to eliminate the process that you were going to go and do or question requirement thing exactly yeah like um you can you know speed up parts you can you know have a courier deliver your part in eight hours from florida to california if you need to um i think our biggest the biggest place we've seen speed improvements is when you you ask the question of like why are you doing that and like it's not a super novel approach i don't think and like maybe there's unique things we do that others don't that I don't know about.

1:05:52But I think it's just the basic of like, do we actually have to be doing this thing right now? And like, what is the core reason we're doing it? And like most of the time we find out that the core reason is based on an assumption or a requirement that was determined or set early enough that it was the best one that could have been set and it was right for the time, but it's no longer right for today. And so So the fastest way you can speed stuff up is just like remove that as a constraint. Do you have a like process for systematically eliminating things that still like may have made sense, you know, at the very beginning, but don't make sense today?

1:06:29Like, is that actual process? So we try to not do that in a process, but rather in culture. If it's in a process, then people have to remember the process and they have to follow the process and they have to like. That's a whole that's another thing they have to do. But rather we try to instill that in the culture of the team and how we work, which is like, you know, that is the thing that Austin and I try to model within the company. But also, you know, we hire people that do that inherently and kind of think that way inherently. And so that helps with a flywheel when we're sitting in a design review or when we're doing a CAD spin at someone's desk and it's like, you know, why does this exist?

1:07:11Right. And part of the reason you're asking that is because you're curious, and part of it's because you're like, there's something in the back of your head telling you, that doesn't make sense to exist. I don't know the reason, so why the hell is that there? So we try to focus a lot on the culture of the company, and not just like, do you have a positive culture or a negative culture? like that kind of like high like uh you know a higher level you know call it like a glass door culture uh uh write-up but rather like how does culture permeate into like how we make decisions how we design parts how we um how we hire how we show up to meetings all of that is like a part of the culture here at inversion what do you think uh like leadership style wise what what leadership style have you tried to emulate?

1:08:03I don't think I've, I think I tried to take bits and pieces that I like from various different locations. I think there's no one particular person that I think has a leadership style that would work for me. And I think that's like maybe a key thing for me, which is the concept that the leadership style or the management style or what have you is only as right as it is right for the person. In a similar way that like athletes don't all train the same because some like high volume, some like low volume, high intensity, and different things work for different people. I think that's probably the same approach that myself and Austin take.

1:08:54Our leadership styles are completely different. The actual stylistic point, right? I don't find that my style is, or I am the most effective, for example, when there is a lot of structure. I much prefer an unstructured kind of leadership and management style for myself and that works for me and for my my direct reports as i guess as well as there's like a little bit more serendipity day day to day yeah figuring out what to do serendipity or like intentional wandering right like maybe that's a an example where jeff bezos talks about uh how uh what is it called uh it's like pondering or something in the morning.

1:09:44Yeah. He talks about how for meetings, he likes to have a very crisp document they can read and then lots of time to wander. And the crisp document, he likes it in a written format or whatever. But the purpose of that is to make sure everyone's on the same page in the meeting so that there is enough context set that the really smart and creative people in the meeting can then just kind of think and wander and talk and stuff like that. And so I think the main goal I have is to make sure the team is unblocked and trusted, right? Like, like if there's one thing, it's like trust that the team is able to do it, right?

1:10:28Because like 99.9 % of the time, that's true and if you you know hire great people like we try to do they flourish more in the case where they can use their freedom and creativity rather than if they're you're they're like told what to do so I guess like let the team run as long as they're running in the right direction yeah set the why and then let it cook yep exactly interesting for me on interviews I love doing interviews, but I hate editing and I don't love trying to figure out all the logistics around getting to a shoot and making the shoot happen. So I want to hire away those kinds of parts of the job.

1:11:11For you, what's the most fun part about being a CEO and like, what are the things that you kind of just offloaded? It's an interesting question. I love the cycle of talking with customers getting their feedback iterating on the product and having that insight and that like moment of of kind of like uh there's like a feeling when you get when you're like oh i know how to solve that problem for the customer a bit of an aha yeah a bit of an aha moment this kind of like excitement builds and then you kind of like go down the path of iterating on it like i i for at least from an enjoyment perspective, that is the part that I absolutely love is, you know, thinking about a problem from first principles, talking with the customer about it, understanding what they need, understanding what they actually need, and then figuring out how the product can adapt or change or stay the same and meet that.

1:12:18To me, that's like, that is my absolute, by far favorite part of inversion is getting to do that. What was the biggest moment where you were talking to the customer and you did experience that aha? We were talking to a bunch of customers about delivery missions and telling them about how ARK is designed to glide such that it can access the globe. And they were like, oh, you should go talk to the hypersonics folks. You should go talk to the folks down the hall. and we went and talked to them and they were like you know first we try to understand what their mission is and you know oh it's hypersonic testing well what do you test it because in my mind hypersonic testing was always like throw some materials on the outside and see if the materials survive and i was like that can't be that big of a market and like it actually isn't it's not that big of a market but what they what they really wanted arc for was the ability to maneuver during hypersonics lets them test more than just materials.

1:13:20It lets them test sensors on the ground to track the vehicle. It lets them test components inside. And that was a very much like, oh, this is not a one-trick pony vehicle. It's even more than we thought. The core of a low-cost platform that is able to integrate payloads and is able to maneuver in the hypersonic and supersonic regimes of reentry is far more useful than we initially even thought. That was, I think, one that was super cool. Okay, final question. What's the hardest thing you've overcome? I think this is going to be maybe a bit of an unsatisfying answer. I think the hardest thing was the first decision of jumping in.

1:14:13Because once you make the decision, you're going to do it, then everything else is like, well, I got to go solve that problem because I'm doing the thing, right? The decision has been made. It was one decision. It was, are we going to go for it? Do we think that we can have as big of an impact on the world as as we've always thought we could, once you make that decision, that the answer is yes. Everything else fits in a framework of like, well, I am doing this hard thing because, you know, I want to have this impact on the world or, you know, I want to serve these customers or like you're doing it right.

1:14:50It's very easy to not do it right. Like everybody has ideas every day. And like, I, you know, kept a journal of cool ideas for my whole life. And the like first decision of like, are we sending it until we're living on the streets? Yes. All right, cool. Like the decisions made, um, everything else kind of comes a bit easier after that. And on, on the, you know, notebook of all the different ideas that you had, why was this one in particular, something that got you over the edge into deciding, yes, I'm going to go for it. What was the catalyst? um it was a feeling of inevitability that the world would look different right that um that this was such a obvious no-brainer once we thought of it frankly that so the first month we spent looking to see who else was doing it because we couldn't conceive that this wasn't a thing we're like we just probably haven't found you did the whole elon thing where you like go on the NASA website and you're like when's the first Mars mission and then you realize oh fuck it's not there there's no Mars mission like like we literally were like we must be missing something like what is wrong with this right um turns out the why now of inversion is launch costs have come down uh uh costs of components have come down there's capital availability and there's a market demand because now more than ever, global access is important.

1:16:23But yeah, I think it was an obvious nature of, yeah, like we talked about those structural truths, right? What are those undeniable things that were true a thousand years ago and will be true a thousand years from now? and like ai linkedin is like an ethereal concept that is probably useful right now but like what you know was it useful 10 years ago was it will it be useful in 100 years like i don't i don't know um and like that might be an awesome business or awesome company to build but like to me if if like to me and Austin, if we're going to dedicate our lives to go and do something, we want it to be something that we can always say, this will be real in 80 years when we're, you know, when we're old and dying, it was worth spending our time building this business to change the world.

1:17:24Right. And like the, the kind of vision I hang on to is, you know, sitting on the porch with like grandchildren playing in the yard and there's a re-entry vehicle streaking across the sky. And I can look up and say, you know, the team we built was able to do that and make that a commonality that the grandchildren playing in the yard don't even notice it because it's so common. And that's an awesome world to go and live in. Yeah.