Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets

26:49Oh wow. You wanna get your satellites from factory to orbit, to revenue, not just in space, to revenue. So final place in orbit as fast as possible. So like today's world, you are aggregating many satellites on an individual rocket and Starship is gonna amplify this as well because they're so big, you know, you know, we're gonna fill it and get those cost economics that they advertise, you've gotta fill the mass. Okay, so in that world, you've gotta aggregate enough satellites on the ground to make it fill up, you know, the rocket, that takes a couple months, And then you launch, they all get dropped off and now they need to go from that drop -off location, the metaphorical train station to their final location.

27:29And that also takes several months. So you're looking at a deployment phase or period of, you know, eight, nine months to get all the satellites from the time, like leave the factory to the time when they're making revenue. That's a long time in a grand scheme of a three to five year -lead useful lifespan. Yeah. And it's also a lot of money if you look at that, you know, $500 ,000 per satellite per month over nine months and a hundred satellites. Right. So that's a very real money. How do you get that to be more efficient? And I would claim that part of the virtuous cycle that reusable rockets creates is you can do smaller batches directly to final orbit, cut nine months down to two months, and deploy your constellation in much more efficient manner.

28:14Yeah, and maybe just as some background context, satellites in the past, maybe this wasn't as much of an issue because they'd be in orbit for what, 10 years, 20 years, several decades, right? So that nine months was less significant versus to your point. If the cycles are accelerating and you want to stay competitive and your satellite needs to be up in three years, your next one, then it really is cutting into like what, a third of its life cycle that's pretty significant. Yeah, so there's that aspect to it too. The other thing that really switched in the economics of space and launch is you mentioned these assets going on orbit and being alive for 20 decades, literal decades, right?

28:53The other factor is those things are exquisite assets. They cost multiple billions of dollars to make this satellite. All right. In that world, the customer does not care what the launch cost is. It could cost $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, they don't care because if the asset is $3 billion, the only thing they care about is that it gets from the ground to orbit safely. That's it. And that's the right thing to care about when you're payloads. $3 billion, right? But that is completely shifted for the reasons we talked about earlier. Electronics are cheap and powerful. They're small. They're lightweight.

29:33Satellites are much, much cheaper now. And so you now have it inverted where the asset is, you know, what's called a million dollars, but the launch is a hundred million dollars. Now all you care about is the cost of launch. So that has completely flipped in the launch. That's flipped. That's such a great way to represent it. It's literally flipped between launch costs and then the cost of the actual payload. Who else is trying to get satellites up there? Who else is using the information, the capability up there? Or in other words, like who is paying to launch these things into orbit? There's a number of different types of telecom, but telecom is definitely a big one.

30:11You also have position navigation and timing is a big area. So as we go to this world of automated cars, as we look at automated agriculture, improving the efficiency on agriculture, as we mentioned geopolitics, obviously position navigation and timing is very important for our for US -based joint forces, but also forces across allied countries coordinating, communicating, being able to do positioning, missile detection, guided weapons, all of these things, take massive amount of coordination, and those comes all go through space. So that's another big area we can, instead of using, or at least to supplement the exquisite assets we have, we can now look at much lower cost and distributed assets and lower affordment to do those things.

31:02So that's called PNT, position navigation timing. We mentioned and touched on Earth observation, it's another huge one. There are the environmental elements that we talked about. There's also things, you know, like you can do agricultural features through satellite based imagery. You can count cars and parking lots to understand how good the shopping season is. you can do all kinds of things of this nature that we can now, you know, you supplement imagery with some AI and various algorithms, and you can do some really interesting, powerful things. I think that you'll see more and more as data goes to space, you're going to see more and more on -orbit compute become more important.

31:43Because it's relatively expensive and there's a physics -based choke point to get that data from orbit back to ground. And I think you're going to see more and more compute go on orbit. so that we can take massive amount of imagery, and I as a user can go request whatever insight I want, and that compute is actually done on orbit, and then only the final answer is shipped down. Fascinating. Things like that, right? So this is kind of like the cloud. The cloud starts to move on orbit. The cloud is actually up in the clouds. That's so funny. So just as one quick follow up there, when you're talking about the different capabilities, who specifically is purchasing?

32:21Who are the purchasers? Are these universities? I assume governments part of the role there. Who are the different entities? Could I, if I wanted to, you know, it had enough money, could I buy a satellite and ship it up there? Or what are we seeing in terms of who's actually doing that? Well, you could if you wanted, and you had a use case, but I think what you're gonna see more and you're already seeing is you as a person can go by imagery. Let's say a hurricane comes, you got displaced and you don't have access back to your home yet. You can buy an image, and I think you can do that today, of your house, your specific location, a day or two, or whatever the lag is, of your house location after a hurricane that you can't get to.

33:06There's a number of different retail use cases like that. I think that you're gonna see, certainly the University of governments, you're gonna see policy be informed. I think that's huge to use data to inform policy decisions, right, especially as we think environmentally, you know, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. A lot of times we get locked in rhetoric that's not really anchored in data and what this allows us to do is anchoring data. Hedge funds, another one that I kind of mentioned, you know, you can use imagery to do various different predictions, etc. Definitely. Let's talk about government specifically because I mean, I feel like the first space race was very, very government -related, government -funded and we're now seeing, you could say this next iteration of the space race be more privatized, but at the same time the government is likely a large buyer and took what is the government looking for when they're participating in this economy?

33:59Well, we kind of touched on this before and this is a great time to bring some more light to it. The historical world is we put up these massive and exquisite assets to specific locations, typically pretty high orbits, and they're very, very expensive and massive, and they're not made to move around. This was okay for the last 30 years for US and its allies because we're really the only ones to have capability to put that kind of mess that high. That's no longer the case and what used to be, you know, again these exquisite assets sitting on their own performing their function, those now have company.

34:36they have company with ambiguous intent, trailing them, watching them, and whatnot. And we really have very little ability to move. So General Shaw has been one of the more vocal people kind of talking about this dynamic in space. And the analogy that he draws is these things are like RVs. If you were to buy an RV and go on vacation, but you only ever got one tank of gas, what would you do? you would think really hard every single time you turned it on and moved it, right? And that's the way they have to think with these assets. And so what he's looking at and the entire DOD is starting to think about is how do you move from that world to a world where you can do kind of on -demand dynamic space operations, right?

35:24Where you can move to a new orbit on demand or you can go to a new orbit on demand where you can move from one orbit to the next on demand. And more and more what's interesting and something that we're seeing a lot of use cases for both commercially and from the government is being able to take things from orbit and return them back to Earth. So now if you have kind of the mobility triangle complete, where you can go to orbit from one orbit to the next and then from orbit to Earth, now you can deploy an asset more or less on demand to perform a function. It can be a high value asset that maybe, it wants to do something, but then you want to retract it and bring it back.

36:04You can now suddenly do that. We really don't have that capacity right now. One way to think about it is, think about conflict on Earth, terrestrial conflict, and the way we deal with those things. When things, when we have a brush up or some event, typically a country will deploy assets to a border or to a location so we can move aircraft carrier into a location or we can deploy troops. And we can do those things in a peaceful way. We don't have to engage, but there's a deterrent, right? And then we negotiate, and then you can pull away that deterrent, right? We can't do that in space. We don't have that ability.

36:42Again, one of the unexpected byproducts of four usability is unlocking that ability to deploy assets and then retract them. I know it's hard to make predictions, but how close are we to actually having that capability of bringing things back down because let me know if I'm wrong. Right now, all the satellites that we're shipping up there for the most part continue in orbit and then eventually burn down through the atmosphere or is there another way that they currently come back down? That is the way that satellites come back down. There are perhaps other ways, the typical way to get something back down is through a capsule.

37:17So we do do this. We go to the space station, for example. We deliver people or cargo or whatever and then we bring things back down and the way you bring things back down is with a capsule. Typically those have relatively small amounts of maneuverability built into them. And it's a whole different type of an asset. And what we're proposing is you can do this with the deployment asset that has to come back anyway, right? So it's kind of a natural buy product of your average everyday mission. But yeah, so capsules are the way we do it. That requires an additional system, a whole separate vehicle in order to do it.

37:52And all we want to do is take that away and just make it part of every single mission we ever fly. If we look ahead, what is this unlock? Could be drug discovery or a lot of people think of space tourism, but paint a picture of what you see and what gets you very excited. Well, what gets me excited is like the breadth of totally different things that can be unlocked. I think a good place to start would be to think about innovation itself. What are the conditions that make rapid innovation possible? An example would be take your typical PhD student, it's about a five -year study window. What you would like to be able to do is for that student to do, let's say, three to five iterations on some technology or a thing that they're doing.

38:37And that's pretty typical for ground -based experimentation and development. But if you were to say, hey, typical PhD student with typical PhD funding, can you do three to five experiments on orbit, iterate three to five times and really developing a new sensor or a new alloy or a new whatever it is technology. the answer is no. Like the average PhD student, there's no way they can, like maybe you'll get one experiment up and it'll be small because it's expensive and takes that long. And what we want to do is to be able to get down to low enough cost and high enough availability where that typical student can do three to five things.

39:16I think that's a kind of a good mindset. What is it on lock? We talked a lot about sensors, right? So one experimental sensor is another environmental kind of example. But think about plastics and microplastics in the ocean. Where are they? And where do they come from? Well, there's a sensor. It's an experimental one going up to try to detect microplastics in oceans detected from space so we can see where they're consolidating. And then that's obviously the first step into going and cleaning them up. So that's one example. But you think about maybe a little bit longer term. There's certain technologies or applications where the combination one or the other and then the combination of microgravity, so 0G and pure vacuum of space are very helpful.

40:02One example would be alloy creation. Alloys on Earth get molten metal that then gets mixed up. And as it cools, there's buoyancy effects. There's cooling effects that are imperfect. And as a result, you get imperfect mixing and you get kind of what are called inclusions or imperfect crystal formation. And in microgravity, those go away. And you can get perfect crystalline structures that's been demonstrated with alloys that won't mix on earth, but will mix in space. And so you can get really cool, I think, material sciences, ripe for disruption if you can get to and from space with relativties.

40:43But that's obviously something where a lot of mass has to go up to Earth and then, or up to orbit and then come back down. Another one is bio -farma. So, biofarma proteins, for example, grow very well in microgravity. There's a lot of use cases for zero G in biofarma space. The problem, though, historically has been twofold. In a lot of use cases, that biofarma experiment will die in that process, right? Yeah, it makes sense. You need to kind of lock it up, ship it metaphorically the next day, have it do its thing before it dies. And then in a lot of cases comes back, should come back in a nice soft landing.

41:24So if you're growing tissues, for example, you can't slam it with 20 Gs on the return, right? You can't let it get super hot, right? You have to think about keeping a mouse or a person alive through this process. So that's another one that, you know, just the conditions to do any experimentation at all are not there. There's a company that is trying to grow replacement retina on orbit. but that's very interesting. Growing replacement organs, or organ transplant on orbit is another one. Protein growth, so think about our meat supply. It's a huge environmental impact and in the grand scheme of efficiency, not very good growing entire animals, right?

42:05Basically that's what we're doing. So can you do that efficiently in space? Okay, so that's kind of like the manufacturing side, fiber optics, another classic example that can be drawn very long, perfect crystalline fiber optics on orbit and microgravity. It's hard to do on Earth. So manufacturing in space, I think if you give it enough time, and if you solve an ability problem, that's going to be a very big sector in ways that I don't think we can predict. St .Vis is goes back to our transcontinental shipping, right? Such a great example, though, truly, because that would have sounded as outlandish hundreds of years ago, right?

42:38Yeah, that's right. So there's that aspect. I think tourism is another big one. I think a lot of people do want to go to space. I would love to go to space. If it's safe and it's interesting and there's places to go, I think starship is actually going to unlock that. So massive, massive structures in space, starship absolutely unlocks that. To me then, the question is, okay, let's say you have the space hotel, how does that get serviced? The starship, the right thing to be servicing it on a weekly basis. I'm pretty sure, especially early, the clientele that can afford to go to space aren't going to love eating astronaut ice cream for a week's end, right?

43:13You might be surprised. All right, maybe at the beginning, but after a week, that's going to get old. Yeah. So, how do you have a fresh and regular supply of goods and services to those stations? You're probably going to want weekly or multiple times per week supply of fresh food or raw material supply and then the downmass of finished products or waste. And I think those things are something that are smaller than what Starship offers. By the way, tourism is another one. And I think if you're willing to think long enough, this is decades in the future, but I think mining and resource development, I think is another one, whether that's on the moon or asteroids, there's actually a prospecting mission going up by NASA to go look at a high net worth asteroid, let's say.

43:58And I think if you're willing to think long term enough, then that becomes important that maybe even dominates the rest of these in terms of the economic scope. And if you think about it, is critical for us moving off planet as a species? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just love the term height, net worth asteroid. I feel like that's a, you know, I'll be monitoring that one on Google Trends. But no, that's the great picture that you painted and maybe just a ground us in, again, no predictions here. How soon are we looking at getting maybe this second stage running? where Stoke at in that journey tell us a little bit more about maybe the nearer term trajectory.

44:39Well, I think this is the decade to figure that out. And I think, you know, we talked about the cost economics at 20X factor that's still out there to be had. I think the first small number of companies to demonstrate those economics, those are the ones that win. And so, yeah, I think that happens this decade. And that's pretty exciting because, you know, it's 2023. And And yeah, I think that's going to happen. Where Stoke is in that journey is, this is the lens that we've founded the company on. And I think that, first of all, you have to think about it from day one. It has to be engineered from the ground up in order for it to work at all.

45:14And so you have to understand what that second stage looks like. And so that's where we focused our early time. We have developed, I think, the biggest question marks we've had in terms of will this work? can we create a system that is robust and reasonable enough? I think those basic questions have now been answered. Yes, we've demonstrated a full scale second stage rocket engine and heat shield, which for us in our design is integrated as one. We've demonstrated that kind of full operational window on the ground. We've demonstrated it up to very close to what we expect the reentry heat loads are going to be.

45:52On the heat shield, we've demonstrated control authority of the engine, which is kind of done in a new and different way on our system. We've demonstrated really the whole end -to -end loop of really the technology basis, but also things like software and avionics and power systems and guidance navigation and control and you know that whole control loop of systems that has to be live and on board to make this thing work. We're going moving out on the first stage. We're working very aggressively to put the system on orbit toward the end of 2025. And then I think, you know, in fairness, probably multiple missions to figure out how to prove and figure out and make it efficient to make the whole reusable cycle fully tractable.

46:36Definitely. You know, you are one of the few people who not only believed that reusable rockets could work, but also decided to be the one to pursue that together with your company. And so given the ambition, the optimism you had, could you speak to any challenges that even surprised you coming in that you faced along the way where you're like, wow, you know, I still want to do this, but this is surprisingly hard. Look, I think we've benefited a lot from being in the industry for a little while, understanding and being able to think critically about what works and what doesn't work and being able to design a company that just iterates on all of those things.

47:18So you mentioned supply chains. We very firmly believe that vertical integration is extremely important, especially for the R &D phase. You have to control your dependencies and have the ability to iterate very quickly if you're going to move at a pace that you want to move at. And do it for the cost that you predict. You can't outsource those dependencies to some supplier who may or may not care about your success. In terms of unexpected challenge, I think, and this is maybe to the other founders out there, is fundraising. Even in a good fundraising cycle, you see these headlines go out. Whatever, XYZ raises a good $1 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000.

48:03And all you see is the headline. You're like, oh, that got funded. How hard could that be? It is not easy, right? And so that's something that I, as I found it, had no idea about and have the network and have the understanding of how to do it. And it is a challenge, right? So maybe that's one of the biggest unexpected things. The rest of the stuff we know is hard, we can plan around it. But that was the unknown. You mentioned other founders out there. And I think when you're this early to an industry, there are just endless opportunities that you spot along the way. But you have your hands tied as you're building this reusable rocket company.

48:37And so any opportunities, gaps, things that you're seeing that you're like, you know what? If I could clone myself and maybe that's eventually on the horizon, I would attack this problem or this problem, or maybe Stoke would benefit from a founder attacking things that you can't pursue on your own. Anything come to mind there? First of all, I think it's so empowering to take the founder view of the world, which I didn't always have. But with the founder view of the world, you start asking yourself questions. What are the important problems that need to be solved and how can I go and do this in a way that's a sustainable business?

49:12I will say one of the problems that I knew had to be solved is let's say the idea of software for hardware purposes. The idea of organizing work and tracing part pedigree part history from inception to deployment and then through operations all the way through retirement. This is the idea of part pedigree and And it's something that has not been solved well by the industry. It's something that I knew had not been solved well by the industry. We in fact, one of the reasons that we did why a combinator was to get a ground floor view of the different SaaS products being born. But we wound up making a decision to, hey, we need to build this software for ourselves.

49:54It's something that the same decision that many hardware companies make. And if they don't, they're stuck with spreadsheets that are imperfect, never up to date, never coordinated and they just try to deal with it imperfectly. And so we bought this on and after a very early discussion, it's something that we decided, hey, you know what, like we need it, we know everybody else needs it. Let's build this in a way that is sellable and can be shared with everybody. So we built this product called Fusion by Stoke and it tries to connect those dots and we just did a general release for that and something that we're finding a lot of traction with.

50:27So that's cool. It's also not your question. I think there's a word of possibility in space. But before we started the company, we were thinking about different world problems that need to be solved. And there's two of them that have stuck with me that I still think about. One of them is kind of desalination. That problem is a big one. Well, I would say also clean energy, huge problem, but there's also a lot of money and effort going into that one. So that one maybe already being attacked. One question just to close us out is, if we do get to this vision that you paint of us having fully reusable rockets, We have these turnaround cycles of days instead of months or even years and you see this constant level of iteration It sounds really exciting, but also something that comes up is just imagining the congestion up there all of these satellites trying to maneuver People may have heard of the Kessler syndrome We actually got the chance to talk to privateer around a year ago and about what they're doing in terms of situational awareness But it also feels, you know, I just spoke to how certain industries haven't caught up.

51:32It also feels like maybe the law as it relates to space hasn't caught up either to the speed that companies are now iterating. How do we kind of set ourselves up for success so that the system that is growing so quickly operates in the way that we want it to? Yeah, this is a really good question. In many ways, it is the Wild West in space. There's regulation to get up there, but once you're up there, there's very little regulation. And even more so, there's almost no means to enforce whatever regulation there would be. And so listen, I think the industry and the regulatory bodies need to move together, as always, for a new industry.

52:13I think the first step is, you know, think very critically about, do no harm, right? So that's the first step that businesses should think about from the get go as an example. So do know harm would mean don't leave junk in space. Surprisingly, most of the conjunctions or collisions as they're called conjunctions, most of those happen to be with dead second stages that are out floating around, believe it or not, from the earlier days. And the reason why those are more prevalent is the stages are huge. They're massive things and so just from a surface area perspective they have a higher probability of hitting other things So you know it's a little bit self -serving But an obvious thing is don't dump your second stage on orbit and a dead orbit and have it like sit up there for decades You're starting to see some regulation when you deploy a satellite, you know You used to have a d orbit plan, you know has to come out of orbit over 20 years that number is now five years Again, there's very limited way that you can enforce that, but that's now the guidance.

53:15So we talked about earlier, if you're deploying new constellations on a period of three to five years, is there like a picket tree, plant a tree type model where you can deploy a new satellite and then bring the old ones down? Maybe so, maybe you have to start thinking about that. So there's a lot of support industries that make sense and have to come online in order to make the rest of the economy work and flow as well. Yeah, it feels like we're so early. It's interesting because I don't know if when you have been in the industry for a decade You feel like oh this industry really started decades ago and it's been here for so long or if you feel like we're just the tipping point We're at the very beginning, but I guess both can still be true Yeah, I think a lot of these hard -tech things even look at computers and things like that.

53:59There's decades of very early kind of proof of physics, let's say that happens. And then something happens, whatever that is, and the flywheel really starts going and you get that exponential growth. We've had those decades of kind of a marination period in our industry, the physics demonstrations. I don't even think we're like in the exponential growth phase yet, I think it's at the very beginning of that. And I think what needs to happen is the full reusability problem needs to be solved, and then that unlocks the real growth. Here's another good historical example. If you look at the trajectory of aircraft, commercial aircraft, in the 1930s and 40s, it was obviously a very war driven at that point, but what you had is a ton of different companies attacking this problem.

54:45Air planes looked very different. You had triplanes, you had biplanes, you had the spruce goose, you had very weird aircraft being developed. And it wasn't until two inventions where the whole thing kind of consolidated. And those two inventions were the jet engine and the pressurized cabin. That's what made commercial aircraft possible. And when that happened, you saw massive consolidation. And that's when the really the aerospace prime started to really take shape and form into what they are today. I think that's where we are. We're in like the 1930s and 40s for space. We have a lot of different ideas that are being tested.

55:20And in my opinion, mastering the first stage reuse and the second stage reuse are the two ingredients that are going to lead to mega consolidation and then also a healthy and thriving economy. Yeah, well I'm excited for it and thank you for spending all this time with us and walking through this with us, but also for the work that you're doing, being one of the many companies who's trying to figure this out, trying to get us past the 1930s and 40s and get us into that hey day where we all can fly now today, relatively safe. You know, I was reflecting on the fact that we board airplanes without even batting an eye people aren't thinking about oh, you know Is this gonna go down?

55:55And they're just some people sleep on the plane they watch movies They're not even thinking about the fact that this is like a marvel of engineering and hopefully we can get to the same Spot with space. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it If you liked this episode if you made it this far help us grow the show Share with a friend or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can leave us a review at ratethispodcast .com slash asexency. You know, candidly producing a podcast can sometimes feel like you're just talking into a void. And so if you did like this episode, if you liked any of our episodes, please let us know.

56:37I'll see you next time.