Neurosymbolic AI outperforms chatbots and product search | E2327

26:09I think we already hit it, but it's the, yeah, when automated accounts and AI slop outnumber the traffic and or content. I think you already see this most prominently in comment threads and replies, where once there used to be robust conversations after almost every piece of content you could find, and now it's almost always a bunch of bots talking to each other, overwhelming human participation. This is why I charge$1 a month to reply to most of my tweets. I have 2 ,200 people out of my 1.5 million followers. So 1 % would have been - I'm one of them. 15 ,000. So I think I have 10 basis points on my follower count who pay$1 a month.

26:51I give it to charity. and I'm increasingly think I'm just going to give it back to people randomly. Like, I'll just pick one of the, I may just pick one of the followers, 10 of the followers. X money, you could just easily do that. That's right. And then it's just like, okay, you're, I mean, I might get then, maybe one of these organizations is going to come to me and say, I'm creating a gambling multi-level marketing scheme because if you put a dollar in, you have a chance at 2 ,200 every month. You're going to be the Bernie Madoff of X money. of the people that pay are there still bots no do you see no there are maga lunatics who think i'm a libtard and there are libtards who think i'm a maga lunatic and i told them you can insult me you can flame me if you give the dollar to charity i'm all with it it's totally fine uh Zach, continued success.

27:49Everybody check out ontop.com. Thank you. Very cool product. Today, we're going back to space, my absolute favorite place to build. There are so many startups that are doing interesting things in our local orbit and in our solar system. I love talking to all of them, especially right now in the wake of the SpaceX IPO. I feel like a lot more people are paying attention to space. So it's a great time to sit down with the founder, building something I think we're really going to need and not many people know about. So please join me in welcoming Ashi Disanayaka to the show. She's the CEO and co-founder over at Spacium.

28:19Ashi, how are you doing? I'm really good. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so glad because we get to talk about a pet topic of mine that I really love, which is in orbit or in space refueling, which I think is really cool and really matters. But I think a lot of folks don't know what it is and why it does matter. So could you start by just giving people kind of the basics as to why this is a problem that needs to be solved now? Yeah. Okay. So So space industry is growing rapidly and we see so many space companies coming up with like OTVs, moon missions, launch vehicles. And all these missions and all these spacecrafts are currently limited by the amount of fuel they can carry.

28:58So which compromises on the payload, how much payload they can carry, how much further they can go in space. They can't do crazy manuals. They can't change orbits. So that's what we are solving because it's like, just think of us like a service station here on Earth, but in space. because when the highways were built and like on Earth, you need fuel to go from one corner to the other side of the city, right? Like, oh, from LA to New York, you need fuel. But that's exactly what we need in space as well. So to go from place to place, you need fuel. And right now, all these spacecrafts are launched by the exact amount of fuel they need for the mission.

29:38And to replace with fuel, you need to compromise on the payload. or you need to compromise on the range, they can travel. So that's where we come in and we basically give them more options. So now they can travel further, carry more payload. Here's a nightmare scenario for any unprepared founder. You're about to close a huge enterprise deal and suddenly the legal team pipes in. What's going to happen if you get hacked? Thankfully, you're prepared and you listen to This Week in Startups and you already know about YSecurity. Y-Security is over 40 security engineers with elite experience at trusted companies like Apple, Uber, Brex, Robinhood.

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30:55The flexibility point is very interesting. I hadn't thought about how the fuel load would be exactly tied to the target mission. But if something goes wrong and they need more fuel, what do spacecraft do today to compensate for that crisis? Right now, they just have to scrap that whole mission and send an A1. So, yeah, and it's not just about missions going wrong. Even the missions that do go well, they're currently being compromised. So what types of fuels do we need to have in these future orbital gas stations that we're going to have? Because I know there's a variety of propellants used in space.

31:27And I'm curious which ones you think are the most important and the ones you're going to target first. That's a really good question. So I'm going to give a bit of background. So we are doing two types of fuels. So we are doing storables as well as cryogenics fill. So storables are xenon, krypton, hydrazine, and cryogenics are the ones that have to be stored at really cold temperatures, like minus 190 Celsius or minus 310 Fahrenheit. So that's really cold. So that's liquid oxygen. Yeah, that's, for an example, liquid oxygen. So if you don't store these fills at these really cold temperatures, what happens is the temperature increases and you basically have to boil off, which means it's like water.

32:06like it boils off and then you have to rent it out. Otherwise, we are going to see an explosion. So you paid all that money to get it up there and then you have to slowly release it if you can't keep it at the proper temperatures. That's terrible. Exactly, exactly. So that's something we cracked. During YC, we went through summer of 2024. We went through YC. So me and my co-founder, we cracked that problem. We built zero boil off technology, fill tanks. So our first idea was before we even got more customer demand, we were solving for crashing. We were solving to store and transfer Krasnick fuel because that's what the initial demand we got from our customers.

32:42So that's why we saw the zero by-off technology. And then we got reached out by other customers who were wanting like water or xenon. And so then we decided, OK, now we have to be more fuel agnostic. So we are going to do store bills as well as Krasnick fuel. So our initial customers or initial stations will have xenon. And then those customers are also moving into Krasnick in the long term. So yeah, we are fuel agnostic. So you're going kind of both ways then, both the fuel you have to keep cold and the fuel you don't, simply because customers want both. Do fuels that need to be kept cold have a different use than fuels that are less temperature sensitive?

33:18Are they used for longer flights or shorter bursts? How does that break down? Yeah, so it also depends on what our customers, the other spacecraft, their mission is, right? So with cryogenic fuels, you get more energy. So that's the basic idea. So for an example, if you want to go to the moon, they mostly use Krasnick fuel. So we have customers who's asking for like 10 metric tons of Krasnick fuel because of their moon mission. 10 metric tons? Yeah. So because of their moon missions. Just to be clear, Ashi, we're talking about bringing all this up from the planet's surface to orbit, and then you're going to provide it, but we're not manufacturing anything in space yet at that quantity.

33:56No. Okay. No. Wow. That's a lot of weight. That is a lot of weight. That is a lot of weight. Yes. Okay. Before we get too far into the wait point, I want to ask about electronic propulsion. Because I think probably folks listening to this have heard about the use of electronic propulsion to do some in-orbit maneuvers. So why does that fail to meet the needs of customers that are coming to you for cooled or just kind of gaseous liquids? Yeah. So electric propulsion, like we think electric propulsion can also really benefit from refueling. So it's not like, oh, electric propulsion is not going to work.

34:26It definitely works, but they will benefit from refueling. So electric, chemical, even nuclear propulsion will benefit from refueling. because now they're building a nuclear propulsion and he has spoken to some companies who thinks they will need refilling even for their nuclear propulsion systems as well. So it's not just one type of propulsion system won't work. It's just they can get more benefit from being able to refuel. Let's talk about launch costs because I was talking to the folks over at StarCloud, a very cool company. They want to build in-orbit data centers. And the CEO was like, look, our entire company is a bet on launch costs coming down.

35:04If Starship and New Glenn don't work, then we don't work because the economics don't pencil out. I'm curious about what needs to happen to make it feasible to bring up those 10 metric tons that you mentioned earlier of fuel, because I think right now, if we did it all with Falcon 9s, it would take a while just to get that one set of material up to orbit. So do you guys also depend as much as other companies on heavier launch vehicles come into market? No, not really, because our initial customers are asking for like two metric tons, five metric tons. So we have that capability currently to actually send the amount of fuel we need.

35:39But yes, when we have to scale up more, like 10 to 30 metric tons of fuel, yes, then we will have to depend on heavier launch vehicles where we can send more fuel to space. But we are not depending on Starship or New Glenn for our business plan to work. Because right now, everybody launches. And where we actually give value to our customers, how much they can do once they go to space, once they're in open. So that's when we actually give them value. They can go from Leo to Geo. I watched your session with Tom Mueller, where he mentioned like for their Helios, they could, if there was a refilling station, they could get more value out of their Helios from Leo to Geo.

36:24That's exactly what we are providing. So we don't really depend on the launch vehicles, like launch vehicle cost. Well, but it does improve your economics. I presume that if we had lower launch costs, then it's a tailwind, not a glass wall. Exactly. Because at the moment, we all pay the same amount for the launch. And also our technology allows us to store fuel in space for longer periods of time. And that's your zero boil off thing that you invented during YC. Exactly. As also we can store, like for Xenon as well, we can store for longer periods as well. That's fantastic. Okay, so quickly before we get into what you've built and how it's performing up in space, to me this sounds like a piece of work that will apply equally to both commercial and defense applications.

37:14One, is that correct? And two, where are you seeing the most early demand? And you mentioned customers earlier. I'm curious where they kind of fall on the commercial defense continuum. Yeah. So we see demand from both sides. So we don't just see the demand from the defense side. We have like all our customers right now are commercial customers. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because like YC says, build something people want. So we actually wanted to make sure we have people who's going to buy our product. so we iterated so much with what our customers want so we would build something and then we would always get feedback and then if they don't like it we would change it so so we got like over the last two years we got so much feedback in terms of hardware in terms of type of feel yeah in terms of how our hardware should dock their spacecraft or how like how much risk they're willing to take so i'm blown away by how fast your company has moved you went through yc and oh, I forget.

38:15Was it 2024? Yeah, summer. Yeah. So summer of 04. And you've already put somebody into space. You've already done iterations. A bit of technology. But when I was growing up, space was slow and hard. And it took forever to do anything. And you're thinking about multi-decade NASA contracts and cool stuff. Everyone loves the James Webb Space Telescope. But oh God, did that take a while? So what's changed that allows and I say this with respect, a scrappy startup like Spacium to do so much so quickly? Um, so, so me and my co-founder, we, we love space. We are like, we, that's what we live for, to, for Spacium to, uh, send pillows to space and to build this refilling station.

38:58So we built our first pillow in five months, just the 12th of us in five months. And it was the most accurate robotic actuator ever tested in space. The way we did that was obviously obsession was big part of it. Like, because we never felt like we are working. it was just every day doing something we love but and also we brought all the testing in-house so our iteration cycle was really quick compared to how space industry usually works so we brought all the testing in-house we do 98 percent of the testing in-house so so we build something we test and if we test it until it breaks and then we improve on it so that's why we were able to like do so much with so little time.

39:40When it comes to, you know, the fast iteration of building something, testing it, improving it, building it again, we're going to talk about your robotic actuator in a second, but this is a piece of physical technology. So do you guys also have like in-house milling machines and all the necessary tools to quickly prototype and iterate? Yeah, we do. We have T-Racks, we have vibration bins, we have like everything. And you can do all that with two people? We did that with two people for the first mission, But then for our next missions coming up, we are growing. Now we are a growing team. So it's not two people anymore.

40:13I was going to say, like, I mean, someone has to, like, enter the trash cans, do the payroll. Like, I mean, there's a lot of work to do just to keep the business from falling off a cliff. Yeah, yeah. Let alone do it all now. Yeah, it's not anymore. So we, it was, we had, like, we have so many fun stories about what happened during our first mission because it was just the two of us and it was, like, crazy. We have one of our advices. He was one of the early employees at SpaceX. And at one point, because we went quiet, like we did not reply to him. And then he was so worried something happened to us because it was the two of us building pillows.

40:45And he was like, where's Ashi? And Reza, like, we don't know where you guys are. But we were fine, obviously. And we were fine. But and then after the first mission, we started hiring. Now we have amazing engineers who's also equally obsessed. How big is the team now? We are seven people. We also like to keep the team lean because it helps us move faster because then we don't have a lot of bureaucracy and we don't have like everybody owns their piece in the fossil and then moves forward. Yeah. I've heard that from software entrepreneurs, robotics entrepreneurs, space entrepreneurs. Every single person is like, we want to have the minimum viable team accelerated with as much technology as we can.

41:27So that makes good sense. Let's talk about your mission, though. So you were on a rocket last December, and then this February you announced that you, quote, flew the most precise robotic actuator ever tested in orbit. So what does that mean, and why does it matter for in-space refueling? So robotic actuator is what goes into our robotic arm. So with that precision of the actuator and exactly end of the robotic arm, we'll have a precision within 0.5 millimeters. us. So with that type of precision, we can dock to the incoming spacecraft so precisely, and it reduces the risk for all our customers.

42:05And then we start the refueling process. So that's why that type of precision is so important, because if you can't dock to the incoming spacecraft precisely, it's going to be a huge disaster, basically. Are the tolerances that fine for docking onto a spacecraft? Okay. Oh, yes. Okay, why? And this is just pure ignorance leaking through here, but it doesn't make sense to me that it has to be that precise, given that we're talking about a thing, and then, you know, like, why can't it just, like, fit once it's, like, attached? What do you mean? Why can't it fit? Well, you know, like, go back to Apollo 13, the movie, right?

42:43When they're trying to, like, put the thing into the connector port, like, it kind of, like, missed and kind of, like, hit and then kind of slid in. why isn't there a little more tolerance to the linking of your future space station refueling facility and the spacecraft? Like what drives that lack of tolerance? Yeah. So if you can't dock precisely, it really increases the risk for our customer. And that's not a risk our customers are going to take. So this is another feedback that we got from our customers. So are our spacecraft just less tough and durable than I'm imagining? And therefore, you have to treat them very, very carefully.

43:18And therefore, the tolerances are so fine. That's also a funny part, because we build cars to like be really robust, right? But we build spacecrafts like they're like little babies that we can't even like do anything. Like if something goes wrong. And also in space, we don't have humans on board. So if something goes wrong, we don't have, usually we don't get a certain chance to fix that. And so that's why we want to make sure everything goes smoothly. The first time, very less risk because with risk, like it's like a chain of events, like more things can go wrong. Okay. So you got your actuator up in space.

43:56You showed that it works. What is next for the company as you work towards building your first actual facility that can accept fuel and disperse it? So we have a Xenon bill transfer. This is the first time I'm saying this out loud. So yeah, you guys are the first to know. Thank you. We appreciate that. Yeah, of course. We have a mission coming up really soon, within the next year or so. So we'll be transferring Xenon in orbit. And then we have another mission coming up within the next one and a half to two years where we have a pre-flying spacecraft and we will be docking into another spacecraft and we're also transferring Xenon in orbit.

44:34So those two missions are coming up and we are fully funded for those as of right now. Fantastic. Now, demand for in-space refueling is not a hypothetical, it sounds like. It sounds like this is a very acute need now, essentially. Okay, cool. Because sometimes you build ahead of the market, sometimes you chase what's needed, but it sounds like the moment you can get this up and running, you're going to have business. Exactly. I have heard from bigger companies. they're waiting until someone actually put their stations up there and then they will start building their technology around refueling but so it's just kind of like chicken and egg problem and also we do have customers who's bringing take that risk and actually get fuel i'm really excited once we have this technology i think it's going to make everything so much easier and less uh unfault tolerant and then hopefully you can build more robust things and do more stuff and get back to the moon and then i can go to space too it's It's going to be fantastic.

45:33So I did talk to a company called Orbit Fab a while back, and they were talking about their kind of like standardized enterprise refueling interface, which I think is kind of the connector port. So I'm curious, what's the SpaceSeam approach to connectivity to other spacecraft? Is that a difficult thing? Or am I over-indexing on a bit of news that I just happened to remember before we jumped on the chat? No, that's a really good question. So that's something I would love to talk, but there will be some really groundbreaking news coming up about standardization. really soon so just keep an eye out and uh yeah can you uh give give me a hint about really soon like should i have my eyes peeled in the next couple of weeks or is this like a q4 thing oh no like within the next month or two okay okay cool but we'll have to have you back on to talk about that because i'm really curious because i mean like um i hope that there's eventually a usbc equivalent for in-space refueling so that way it's super simple super quick and everyone can use the same thing to avoid, I mean, just an unnecessary plethora of dongles in space to do the connections that we need.

46:36It seems simpler to have one standard. So I'm hopeful on that front. Yeah. Standardization is really important. And also, it's not just about standardization. It's about how that standardization works and adapts to the current and current spacecrafts or future spacecrafts. So yeah, keep your eyes out for it. We were talking at the top of the show about how once we have the ability to refill spacecraft, they can do more, they can, you know, make more adjustments to their course or change their mission or just be more flexible. And right now, if you have to send up a spacecraft with all the fuel it's ever going to have, that impacts design choices.

47:14Once you take away that requirement, how quickly will we see spacecraft design change to take advantage of what you guys are building and also just to have more, I don't know, longevity per spacecraft? Oh, yeah. We'll see that change coming within the next three to five years. Because when we started Spaceium, we had to tell space companies, okay, if you refill, this is what you get. But now, I don't have to explain to them anymore. Like, they already know. And people are already trying to build their spacecrafts around refilling, thinking that, okay, they will be refilling in the future. Okay.

47:50Because it's such a constraint. and with all that mass we want to put into space and with all these things that we want to do in space without refueling is such a bottleneck. So people have actually started developing their space missions around refueling. Okay. Now you mentioned that your next couple of missions are already fully funded. I know you guys raised, I think it was a$6.3 million round last year in quote four weeks. That's impressive. Are you guys going to need to access more capital to finish those missions? And have you already kind of a portion of that? Or does that initial round take you all the way through your next few missions?

48:26Yeah, we actually raised more money after that third round. It wasn't. So we have raised close like$12,$13 million so far. So that covers all our three missions. The one that we already flew and the next two missions as well. Other than we are planning to like come into like more profitability soon because we do have commercial contracts, close to$100 million. and we have two plus billion dollars in LOI. So all those ones, all those commercial contracts convert, we'll be able to be profitable. Yeah, it's kind of rare that a company comes and says, yeah, we have two billion dollars in LOIs for our technology that we're still building.

49:04I think that is the definition of building something people want. Now, thinking about the broader venture ecosystem, if you look around technology today, it's kind of all AI and that's absorbing a whole bunch of capital. Is there still enough investors out there focused on space to keep the space startup industry healthy in the near term? Yeah, I think so. Because space is really hard right now. I have been reached out by multiple investors wanting to talk and better understand our technology. So I think investors are really still interested in space industry as a whole. And then last question is just pretty simple.

49:46SpaceX went public recently, mentioned this at the top. I'm curious if that has changed the level of excitement and enthusiasm around investing in space-focused companies, because I think a lot of people that weren't paying much attention and kind of forgotten the fast launch cadence of Falcon 9s and all that are now once again paying more attention. And I wonder if that's creating positive momentum for the space industry. It definitely does. Yes, I would say that. How does that manifest? Because I think a lot of people started giving more attention to the space industry after SpaceX IPO. They're like, oh, space industry.

50:21And then they became so interested, okay, there's actually, there's an industry that we should pay more attention to. Because it wasn't, space industry was there, but people weren't really paying attention until SpaceX IPO. And now people are like, okay, space industry is something we should actually talk about. There's so many cool things happening. There's all these new technologies coming up. And end of the day, space industry will benefit life on Earth. So once people understand that, people will pay more attention. But I have been reached out by a lot of people wanting to talk about space industry after SpaceX IPO.

50:57That makes me so happy here. I feel like it's always good when an IPO can kind of shine light on an entire industry and help everyone at once. Oh, actually, Ashi, before I let you go, you are building this company in San Francisco. And I tend to hear about companies building things that fly and zip around building in Southern California. So can you just tell me why SF or the Bay Area kind of writ large is the right place to build Spacium? It's because after YC, we realized SF is where we want to be because the energy is crazy. Everybody wants to build something huge. and that's the and at space and we are we are weird so we want to be uh in a place where there's a lot of people who wants to be like really crazy things and that really uh and so so we really felt like sf is where we belong um so so yeah we made that decision we want to be in sf i i love san i miss my city but what about what about you guys is is quote quote weird because i feel like everything we've talked about is within the normal envelope of like technology.

52:07So are you weird in a space startup sense or are you guys a different type of company in startups as a whole? I think it's a little bit of both. It's just how we test things, how fast we move. And even like when we interview people, we are never looking for technical knowledge. We are looking for some type of technical knowledge but we're always looking for that mindset who wants to who are obsessed who wants to just work from 5 a.m to like 8 p.m so that's when we actually start working like every morning we start at like 5 to 6 a.m and then and then everybody just grinding but it's such a fun working environment that that's that's the cool part like sometimes I had to tell people like please go home they're like oh no I want to finish this I'll go home after I'm like no please go home so so it's not like i'm forcing anybody to stay up late everybody wants to steal it so so weird in the sense it's like how every everything we build is we always find a way to we always find a hack to make it cheaper or how to move faster no i i really appreciate that i think the hours you work sound incredible I just I have tiny babies and so I cannot do that but I'm always very jealous of people that can devote that much of their time to their core projects I feel like I get 60 % as much done each day as I need to and it compounds over time so now I'm about eight years behind anyways Ashley thank you so much for coming on what's the URL so people can go find out about the company and are there any roles you're hiring for that you would love to shout out to our audience Yeah, we are looking for software engineers.

53:52So if anybody who's obsessed and want to build really cool stuff that can send to space, yes, please reach out. And it's spaceem.com, S-P-A-C-E-I-U-M.com. Yes. So check it out, everybody. All right. And when you announce your next mission or two, we'd love to have you back on, Ashi. But in the meantime, go for it, kick ass, and let's go to the stars. All right. Thank you so much, Alex. It was really nice talking to you. Thank you so much for having me.