Launch is Not Solved Yet, with Andy Lapsa (CEO, Stoke Space)

0:00The biggest value thing that we can do, not only for the near-term market, but for our long-term prospect as a company, is unstick this bottleneck of launch. Do it in a way that's fundamentally changed the economics of space. Eventually, it's going to overtake the global economy, which is real exciting.

0:17Andy Lapsa: That's a statement. It will. I think it's an incredibly important moment for us as a civilization to not screw up. The big glaring shortcoming that the industry has not figured out yet is bringing a vehicle back from space and turning it around and flying again without having to inspect it, without having to refurbish it. You just know that it's good and you turn around and fly again. The way you scale this thing from 100 times a year to thousands of times a year is by making those vehicles reusable. We went from an industry where launch was so accessible. Well, everyone thought. We thought. Costs were going to come down substantially.

0:54Andy Lapsa: So now everyone's panicked about launch. How did that happen?

1:05Andy Lapsa: So Andy, there are two pretty enormous things happening at Stoke right now. Well, one that's already happened. You just raised a billion dollars of capital. So congratulations on that. And you're also announcing a new variant of your Nova rocket. And I think historically, everyone's known the Nova rocket to be a three-ton to orbit, fully reusable launch vehicle. But now that's changing a bit. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you're building. Well, we have what we call the Nova Pathfinder, which is the vehicle we have behind us. Like you said, it's three tons to orbit. We've been working behind the scenes on operating that.

1:45and we're going to build block two of the vehicle as a 15 ton fully rapidly reusable rocket to low earth orbit can do an excess of that and then what we're really excited about as well is because of our really high performing engines on both stages uh it's it's capacity to higher energy orbits is is really pretty meaningful in the market and um and so we're we're going to have one more step on our path to delivering any orbit anytime. That's the goal.

2:16Andy Lapsa: So is it fair to say that this is not necessarily a new version of Nova, but it's almost like Nova's turning into a product family? Nova's a product family. That's right. Exactly. And Pathfinder is going to address that three-ton to market. I think it is a very interesting and underserved market segment. What we've seen over the last few years, and especially in the last six to eight months, is the market has just exploded in the higher mass capacity kind of segments. And we want to make sure that we're able to serve that in a really meaningful way as well. So we have Nova here, and then we're also right in front of the first stage.

3:00Andy Lapsa: So maybe feel free to use the model if you'd like, but what is Nova Block 2 going to look like versus this block one? So first of all, both NOVA's are two-stage to orbit vehicles. The first stage is liquid oxygen, liquid methane. It's a stainless steel construction vehicle. First stage pops you up out of the atmosphere. Second stage takes you all the way the rest of the way to the orbit. And one of the really unique things about our vehicle is that that second stage is fully reusable as well. So I'm sure we'll get into all of that. your question is the difference between um the pathfinder and block two and so what you'll see is the diameter will grow a little bit on the first stage and the height will increase a little bit um but it will leverage all of the same manufacturing methods uh and approaches that we use for pathfinder and we've developed for that in a really really flexible way where we bring in raw material and rocket ships out the the other end of the factory so um so all of that gets to be reused we're using our first stage zenith engine over again we just use more of them and the probably the biggest visual difference is going to be on the second stage where we've worked really hard to what we say internally to delete the taper and so you'll have a cylindrical second stage we'll still have a base heat shield integrated into the rest of the liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen engine and you'll have you know it'll be cylindrical so that we can scale its size without constraining the payload volume.

4:38Andy Lapsa: Right. Now, three tons fully reusable to 15 tons fully reusable. Now, the block two variant expendable payload capacity, what is that? I believe we don't talk too much about the expendable. I think it's about 23 tons. Okay. A little bit higher. Got it. And what's driven that 15 ton number, right? Versus 10 or versus 20. Yeah. Uh, well, a handful of things. So this is not like on a whim. We've kind of been planning this for a while, um, to the point where a lot of our fixed infrastructure is already oversized for Pathfinder on purpose so that we can do this scaling without completely starting over.

5:22Um, so we've got to have that size capacity in mind before it's a um it's a size class that has been you know long time in the industry pretty typical uh it supports payload fairings that again um there's not like a formal standard but there's a de facto standard in the industry uh going back to you know um a lot of government payloads and so uh we're able to support that market uh in a way that pathfinder is not able to do. We think there's a lot of growth there. It's a mass capacity that we think we can fill commercially with third-party customers while still flying as many times as possible, hundreds or thousands of times a year.

6:07At some point, if you oversize it and the market's not there to support it, then you're left with high operating costs and empty payloads. So we're real driven by addressing what the market is, that we have a huge amount of confidence in and we're excited to you know add this to the fleet what specific markets does this open up for you so first of all a lot of government payloads uh um the whole nssl lane one lane two all of the that kind of payloads are um well within reach um obviously the telecom constellations as well There's a lot of mass and volume that needs to go up for those. And we can do those in a really meaningful way with rapid launch, being able to populate a good chunk, if not a full chunk of the one plane at a time.

7:03If you go back, like you're trying to launch thousands of satellites and your metric is time from factory to revenue, then you have to look at like the whole pathway to get there. You're looking at shipping out of the factory, integration time, phasing on orbit time. The process can take months a lot of times. and you know our conviction is that the most efficient way to do that is populate one plane at a time you don't want your satellites to sit on the ground for too long aggregating hundreds of satellites into this a single rocket and then and then you launch let's say more than one plane at a time it takes a long time for them to phase into final orbit so as long as you can snap your fingers and have launch when you want it.

7:55You actually want the right bite-sized chunks to deploy these things optimally, right? So look, I think 15 ton class has kind of been a de facto standard for the industry based on number of rockets of flying. And it kind of has a lot of, you know, history in the market anyway. And so we want to go and be able to serve that.

8:19Andy Lapsa: So you've had a busy day today. And I say that because not long ago, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman tweeted how he was with you at your test facility at Moses Lake. Yeah. Well, did you expect that trip? What did you guys talk about? How stoked were you? Well, it's a tremendous honor to have the administrator of NASA come and take an interest in stopping Moses Lake. and we were thrilled to have him, super energizing for a whole team. Some might say you were stoked. Sure. You missed it the first time I asked, so I had to bring it up again. Yeah, he was in the area and we got in touch and he wanted to stop by and we said, he's excited, let's go fire some engines for him.

9:10And, you know, live demos are always a little bit of a risk. And but, you know, who cares? How could you miss pass that opportunity? So we went out there this morning, we fired the Zenith. We can talk more about test progress, but we fired the Zenith for him and then went over to the second stage engine test stand, fired the second stage engine test stand and then, you know, kind of climbed around both test stands and he got to see the hardware up close and personal. And it was it was great. Amazing.

9:40Andy Lapsa: Well, having a NASA administrator come to your test facility right off the backs of a billion dollar fundraise must feel pretty good. It's been a busy week. Yeah. Well, let's let's talk about the fundraise. Tell me. So this brings your total to, I believe, about two point three billion. Two point three. Yeah. So what is the plan with the capital? Is this something that you needed? Was it more opportunistic because of block two? Like, how are you thinking about this next phase? Look, we've been really fortunate to raise a lot of money. I think that we've been pretty good stewards of that funding.

10:13It was not a situation where we needed the money today.

10:20You know, our Series D was also a success, massively oversubscribed. We did a follow-on, and the first chunk of Series D was really to fund multiple flights of the Nova Pathfinder. What we wanted out of that raise, the purpose of that raise was not to just get to orbit, but make sure that we've got multiple shots on goal. We can get not only prove that we can get to orbit, then also start demonstrating the fact that we can get back into the atmosphere. And so Series D Part 1 was with that in mind. Now, I mentioned for a while we've been looking at our operating path. We've seen the market just really gain a lot of momentum.

11:03Um, and it's important to move fast. And so we had this plan for block two and, you know, we kind of looked at ourselves and said, Hey, we've got great momentum back in the fall. Uh, we don't want to wait, let's go on block two. And so, uh, that was what the D2 fundraiser was all about to sort of kickstart that process. Um, again, great momentum industry has surely not slowed down. And so, you know, we're kind of at the point where block two, you got to look at how this company scales. Yeah, block two is important, but block two operating at a high flight cadence is really what we're after. So that means, you know, you're disaggregating testing and acceptance testing on the CAPE.

11:51You want to build out your test facilities here. You want to build out factory for rate. You want to look at potentially multiple launch complexes so that we can fly hundreds and thousands of times a year. You know, that's the future that we're going for. And this Series E is about green lighting that future in a way that's reasonable right now.

12:13Andy Lapsa: Right. So it's all about scaled operations. So we're sitting here, 170 ,000 square foot facility. Tell me a little bit about where, you know, Stoke has always been about rate production. at very rapid rate, right? So where does that look in a year, two years, three years from now? How do you expect to expand this facility and your testing facility over at Moses Lake? Well, this facility, like you said, 170 ,000 square feet. We walked around earlier. It's pretty full. It's not totally full, but it's pretty full. And we do almost everything in-house from large scale structures, which is right behind us, all of our engine components, avionics, fluid systems, tubes, etc.

12:58So there's a lot packed in here. We can do, by the end of next year, we'll be making these rockets at at least four per year. The factory is kind of designed in size to do seven pathfinders a year. So kind of on that pace, and that looks good. What we're going to do is continue to build Pathfinders and also start building the Block 2 development articles, large-scale structures, etc. in this building. In parallel, we're already looking at expansion spaces, and then ultimately we will need to move to a larger headquarters. And again, that type of thing is a big reason to move forward on the Series E now.

13:45Andy Lapsa: Is there a chance that this is your last private funding round? There's a chance. I think that, look, the way I view it is, to me, the IPOs, obviously, it's a huge success and a big step if that were to happen. But to me, we look on a 10, 20, 30-year time horizon or longer. To me, I think we have an opportunity, first of all, as a civilization, it's an incredibly important moment. for us as humans to get right and to not miss in order to move out into orbit, into the solar system and beyond that. So to me, that's the mission and that's the goal and how we capitalize it and grow it into a business.

14:32I remain flexible on that path.

14:34Andy Lapsa: How has that goal evolved since 2019 when you started the company, right? So you were a senior guy at Blue Origin, senior engineer, you You had real, maybe practically no reason to leave, but you had a slightly different vision of how you saw the future of building rockets. Maybe take me back to that moment when you guys started the company and what did you see for Stoke as a future and how that's evolved to today? Well, what we saw in 2019 was, I think it was maybe not the first wave of capital, but it was the first kind of approaching consensus wave of capital that people mainstream people realize that there is enormous commercial potential in space it was on the heels of Falcon 9 landing the first stage their flight frequency started to increase and you had a major wave of capital moving into space companies there were launch companies There were like 150 launch companies on paper back in 2019.

15:38And you saw satellite companies and you had all these business cases. And so that was extremely energizing to pick my head up and look around and just start to see this happening. It triggered me to, first of all, I didn't want to miss out on it, number one. number two you had it was kind of a realization that you had this crop of talent in 2019 that did not just simply didn't exist in 2010 certainly not in 2000 where you have this this group of people who have kind of come up through the wings in uh in spacex or a blue origin or you know at the point some other companies where for the first time in generations plural you have people who have been part of programs from completely blank page all the way up through flight and had like an enormous amount of scope under their personal purview right um in the 60s they they certainly moved very quickly but they did it with armies of hundreds of thousands of people.

16:47Right. And so everybody had like a little tiny slice in 2010, 15, 20 individuals are doing an incredibly incredible amount of scope at an incredible pace and learning an incredible amount of know how. And in 2019, like that talent's available if you know who and where to look. and so that's an opportunity you had commercial opportunities you know you had capital influx you have unique talent availability and then finally you have like we've been wrestling with this idea of going to space now for 70 years and so that's an incredible foundation to build on and so it's kind of an assimilation it was the realization that you could assimilate all of those ingredients and they're all ready to pop if you can get it right.

17:45And so we thought, hey, like we can put that together. Now, that's enough for me to say, hey, I'm excited about this industry. I'm going to go. It was not intuitive to me to start my own company. In fact, that sounds insane.

18:02Andy Lapsa: Especially with 150 other potential companies. Especially with 150 other companies out there doing it. And so what I saw in a lot of the, and I looked around a lot, like I looked at, let's say the application layer of satellite companies. I looked at launch companies, looked at engine companies. What I saw a lot of the satellite companies talking about was, hey, we've got this great thing. We're going to do this, you know, demonstrator satellite. It's going to show the capabilities and then we're going to scale. We're going to deploy a constellation of whatever it is. At that point, You remember CubeSats were the huge range, right?

18:39So a lot of constellations of like hundreds of satellites or maybe a thousand satellites, couple hundred kilograms each. But they all assumed, maybe not all of them, but like a lot of them assumed, I'm going to get launched for$5 ,000 a kilogram and I'm going to get it whenever I want it. And I was like, huh, is that real? And I wasn't convinced exactly that it was real. I think that as time has unfolded, it's revealed itself that large constellations or customers can't get launch when they want it, especially at that price point. But it's critical for the success of the industry. And so I kind of identified back then that launch is not solved.

19:26And what is it going to actually take to be able to deliver that? and um and so then this is all like you know part of me wrestling with what i want to do i started putting together business models i've never i'm not a business guy or wasn't a business guy putting it other business models to try to understand which of these again 150 companies out there lots of ideas getting thrown at the wall before you could ask claude and

19:50Andy Lapsa: chat gpt yeah exactly build your business model yeah just build it yourself so um so i put it started spreadsheeting this stuff out like which one of these ideas is the winner i'm gonna go work for the winner yeah that's what i wanted to do um and in this process i was basically like oh my god there's only one thing that really matters in the end and that's full rapid reuse all the other stuff is kind of like in the margins not that interesting so were you looking at the time at falcon 9 and saying that's a 70 of the way solution i argue that it's not 70 of the way It's way, way better than not reusing part of it.

20:29Right. Okay. Here was the thought is like, if you are really going to commercialize space, you're going to develop space for real and make it an extension of the earth economy, then you need to be treating transportation and mobility the same way we think about mobility logistics on the ground or in the air or whatever. That's not dozens of flights. It's not hundreds of flights. It's at least thousands of flights per year. So, okay. So how do you do that? What I think is really interesting is just about every company prior to SpaceX ramps up production. And they hit a plateau somewhere between 10 and 20 flights per year.

21:21it's like in our industry even for nation states it's kind of like as as much as many rockets get produced per year right when you throw them away right is that spacex included right right they you can watch look go plot their flight rate it plateaus in the teens until they land that first stage on a barge and after that it doesn't take them long a couple of years and, and you know, they take off. Uh, last year, I think they flew 165 times a year. Uh, I haven't really honestly checked lately, but I think this year is going to be in the same ballpark, maybe incrementally higher or something like that.

22:01Um, and my understanding is that today they're second stage production rate limited makes complete sense, right? Okay. So So great. Falcon 9, a lot of people say changed the industry and it did. I would argue that it even created the industry and the opportunity for all the rest of us. And so, you know, we owe a tremendous amount of respect to that team and everything that they've done, but we're not done yet. Yeah. Right. Like we've still got a lot to do. And the way that you take another zero off the cost structure of launch, and I would argue at least as important, the way you scale this thing from 100 times a year to thousands of times a year is by making those vehicles reusable.

22:46Yeah. Including the upper stage. That's what it's all about.

22:49Andy Lapsa: How much, you don't have to give me exact numbers, but maybe percentage-wise, like how much do you drop your marginal cost if you can reuse the second stage? I think you can take a zero off the cost on the marginal cost basis. So you can take a zero off. It's a factor of 10 or more. Right. Wow. So because, look, you have to, it's not purely marginal cost, but if you look at it holistically as a company, if you're going to fly and throw away part of your rocket, the way you scale is with bigger factories, more test facilities that have higher throughput, more infrastructure, right? And there's a fixed labor cost associated with that as well, even if you're automating.

23:34So if you look at it holistically and you're actually trying to amortize the capex that you put, which I hope a business is thinking about, then yeah, flight rate matters almost as much as a reusability itself.

23:47Andy Lapsa: So I want to ask a slightly different but related question to all this. So we've been putting up rockets in some way, shape or form, humanity has been since the 50s, 60s, and arguably sooner than that, or earlier than that, if you count the V2. How, which was a missile, not a rocket, to be clear. So we've been doing it for quite some time, yet companies have raised north of a billion dollars and have not been able to figure it out. Why do you think it's been so challenging? And I'd hate to ask maybe what might seem like a silly question, but it's actually a question I receive a lot from investors who are just like, hey, why is it still so hard?

24:26Andy Lapsa: Like, what do you think? I'm not even talking about, I mean, we're talking about rate production, I'm just talking about that first getting the stick up there. Yeah. Look, I think that in our industry, there's only one human endeavor that I know of where there's a higher energy density than a rocket engine. Right. And that's nuclear fusion. Yeah. And we have to do it with really thin structural margins. Yeah. We're designed to 20 % yield. Yeah. Okay. So that's like one of the most intense environments humans have ever produced with like very little margin on the sides. And I think that's it. Yeah.

25:12Right. The rocket engines operate with extreme precision because they produce an extremely high power. you know just for just for example the turbo pumps which are like this big produce tens of thousands of horsepower on one end and consume the same tens of thousands of horsepower on the other end they spin depending on the like one of our turbo pumps spins over 100 000 rpm it's a lot of energy and like rotational energy and if you imagine like the wheels on your car getting slightly imbalanced you feel that shaking okay well when you take something and spin at 100 thousand RPM, it has to be pretty damn dialed in in order to not shake itself apart.

25:55Right. And so there's a precision that's required in this industry that you don't find a lot of other places. And I think that's it, right? Like at the end of the day, this - Rockets are hard. From down here to this silver line, that's full of explosives. Yep. With low margins.

26:17Andy Lapsa: Yeah. Well, okay. Well then let's, let's maybe dig into that for a second. You're already taking something that's really difficult, really, really, really, really difficult with razor thin margins. And then you decide I'm going to build the most complex engine out there. Full flow stage combustion for your first stage. What was going through your mind at that point where you're like, okay, we're going to go like it's necessary for reusability, but we are substantially increasing complexity. this is certainly not if you even agree with that statement this is certainly not the simplest rocket to get to space because that wasn't the goal the goal is obviously to get to space but the real goal is build a fully rapidly reusable vehicle you know we just went through the geometry of this thing or any rocket it's almost all explosives with a small little payload on top it is hard just to get to space at all, even if you throw away the rocket.

27:12And when you say, that's not good enough for me, I'm going to save propellant, not burn it all. I'm going to add stuff to my structure like landing gear or anything else, heat shields. that comes at a cost to the payload and so you you know just further shrunk you know the fraction that you get to make payload and what i'm trying to communicate here is um the incentive to have better fuel efficiency on a rocket in general is super super super important and it's even more important for a reusable vehicle because you need to build that elbow room into your architecture somehow in order to add these other things in order to do full reuse.

28:06So, um, so very high fuel efficiency is really, really important. And, um, and full flow stage combustion delivers the highest possible fuel efficiency that we know how to produce as humans, um, at all. right so it's the highest possible architecture performing architecture there is it is difficult it has been attempted a handful of times but it's really only been done successfully once before us um and so that was a kind of an all-in bet on our team and the team that we've put together to be able to go and be the second uh putting together this architecture um and so yeah that was a, that was a, uh, I don't know.

28:52Emotional is coming to where it's not really emotional in that sense, but it was like a weighty, it was a weighty bet that we made to, um, to go and do that. But we had a hundred percent conviction. That's the right mountain to climb. And we're going to want to, if we don't climb it now, we're going to climb it later. Yeah. So the idea was hell, like let's get after it, you know, start climbing. Yeah.

29:14Andy Lapsa: And for the most part, you've retired the programmatic risks around Zenith. I mean, the hardest part, I mean, we talked about it earlier on the tour, but the start sequence you guys have solved. Is there anything else that's left in terms of like getting it to, you know, efficient cadence? We're at the very tail end of our qualification process with Zenith this morning with Administrator Isaacman. We tested our fleet leader. It's got well over, let's see, it's about 4 ,500 seconds of test time on it right now. We have well over 10 ,000 seconds of test time on the program. We've got two qualification engines.

29:55One fleet leader is a little bit ahead of the other one in terms of test time. We have about 50 starts on both of those engines. So like, you know, when you look at life of an engine, you look at both starts and cumulative time. We're in a really, really good spot with Zenith. We have our first ship set of engines on the floor already. Those are about to go and run through ATP testing. So Zenith's in a really great spot. And it's pretty amazing. we had let me see if i can do this on the fly we started testing this engine in a what we called the horizontal breadboard engine it was really like a franken engine put together that was like two years ago and change and i would say that you know we've really and and that like we only started that the whole program was a completely blank page hadn't picked up a pencil 18 months prior to that.

30:53So I think we've really speed run the development. We've done about three different block upgrades as part of our development cycle. We're not going to stop upgrading it. And, and I think it's, it's really, really close to flight ready.

31:10Andy Lapsa: Yeah. And there's seven on Pathfinder. Yeah. First stage, how many are going to be on block two? 14. Okay, so double the size. And then So moving up to the second stage. So let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, you have a very unique heat shield engine fusion architecture with stage two. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe just give us a high level of that and then how it evolves with block two. So the second stage is where we started as a company. So the magic happens. Remember, like we're all in on full rapid reuse. This is it is the inevitable end state of the industry. it is how the industry scales a lot of people you know a lot of criticism i get from or i guess like questions and feedback i get from the investment world as well you know launch kegers you know incremental the size of the market's not that big and whatever and uh what i would posit is that the launch side the size of the launch market and the size of the entire space economy is exactly as big as how many rockets leave the pad.

32:14It's not a drop bigger. And rockets are launching worldwide as fast as everybody can execute right now. That is the bottleneck of the industry. And so again, if you want to make the space economy a extension or even a dominant, like eventually it's going to overtake the global economy, which is real exciting. That's a statement. It will. Yeah, it will. It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of time. Yeah. Right. But it will. Yeah. Now that time could be I didn't say what that time is going to be. Could be hundreds of years, but it will. Yeah. 100 percent conviction. It will. So what does it take to do that?

32:58And again, you need to have vehicles coming and going with aircraft like regularity. So that's the thesis. And the question was early on, can we deliver on that thesis in a way that we think is, first of all, cast as an engineering challenge, not a science problem? If you're betting on some science breakthrough, and I'll include material science in that, then to me, you're praying for a miracle, right? And to me, that's not the company that I would start and go and try to raise outside capital for. So right from the very beginning, it was very important to me that we recast this as an engineering challenge and put it in a pathway where we can realistically build a vehicle that can operate with aircraft-like regularity.

33:45And the big glaring shortcoming that the industry has not figured out yet, which is a present tense statement, is bringing a vehicle back from space and turning it around and flying again without having to inspect it, without having to refurbish it. You just know that it's good and you turn around and fly again. And so a big part of this is heat shield technology. How do you protect a vehicle that goes all the way to space, comes back through the intense heating of reentry, lands, and then turns around and flies again without you caring? That's the name of the game. And so what we've done is design a system that uses a metallic heat shield with liquid cooling veins kind of integrated into its surface.

34:35we pump the propellant we already have on board liquid hydrogen through that heat shield in order to cool it we have direct control over the surface temperature of the metal uh throughout the the um flight envelope that circuit that fluid circuit is integrated into the rest of the second stage engine circuitry and um and i think it's a pretty slick solution that for the first time produces a heat shield that you can walk up smack with a baseball bat and really not care right when you

35:08Andy Lapsa: look at uh starship and starship's heat shield architecture which is ceramic tiles which is not a not a controversial technology it's been around it's been around for a long time nasa's used it for quite some time and then you look at your technology do you see the metallic alloy based heat shield as a material advantage over using ceramic tiles? Well, we certainly think so. I mean, that was a lot of the founding thesis. I think that, you know, re-entry into the atmosphere exposes you to temperatures that are thousands of degrees. It is right at the hairy edge of materials compatibility. And when you get up to temperatures that high so far, the materials that can withstand that kind of temperature on their own in a passive way wind up being extremely brittle they're hard to work with and they're subject to damage right like you can get a micrometeorite strike you can get a bird strike this happened on shuttle uh you can have mechanics dropping wrenches they're tough to bond um they're just really hard to work with and um again i you know we'll see that i've learned one thing in my time in this industry and that's don't bet against SpaceX.

36:29So they've got an incredible team and they've put a lot of work and I know they've improved a lot. But I think we'll see. We'll see how touch-free that solution can be. I think it will require a multi-layer solution in order to have the robustness required to, you know, kind of fly again repeatedly. I think we have a solution that doesn't need that. I think it's extremely mass efficient when you look at it as a holistic vehicle. And I think it's, you know, again, like we, we have direct control over what the surface temperature of the metal is by dictating how much coolant we're flowing through there.

37:12Right. And you can take that one step further. Like, you know, so far we're talking about a low earth orbit system. What happens when you want to go to the moon or a higher energy orbit or Mars and you're coming back from those trajectories, you come in at a much more, you know, kind of a hotter re-entry, literally hotter. Our system, again, so like the genesis of this idea is like, this is how you cool the inside of a rocket engine all the time. And rocket engines have an environment that's about 20 times more intense than the heat of re-entry. So for us, we're not actually scared of that environment.

37:49It's honestly relatively benign for a system that's cooled with liquid hydrogen. And so we can, again, we can tailor the level of that cooling for not only the level of conservatism we want, but for different trajectories coming in from different directions.

38:03Andy Lapsa: Well, so does that actually open up? So because you can be more aggressive on your re-entry profile, does that open up certain markets to you? Like, for example, I mean, I know one of the things you've talked about is bringing down mass back. does that create a lot more advantage in terms of where how how quickly you bring something back and then obviously there's that has more relevance for government military use than maybe commercial but does that kind of weigh into some of your decisions on future product use cases i don't honestly know if the like the re-entry trajectory itself has much impact on um at least the commercial use cases for down mass.

38:44But what I would suggest is that a vehicle that's going to orbit, delivering a payload, and then coming back to do the same thing again on every mission is bringing itself back to ground on every mission. And it sure makes a lot of sense to perhaps bring something back with it. And that's a market that really is, you know, barely served, I think is a fair statement to say. it's almost no down mass coming but there's certainly applications and verticals that would benefit quite a bit from regular service to space and back uh and so we're we're pretty excited about that sector in the long run you mentioned some government applications and and for sure there are those as well um and so uh again i think like one of the most energizing things about being in this industry is that we are so much in day one of the industry.

39:37There's so many different ways we can take this. And I think having a really durable, fully rapidly reusable hypersonic heat shield, that can do a lot of things. And we're excited about that.

39:53Andy Lapsa: So let's, okay, so we're day one of the market, but let's talk about a current market situation that everyone's talking about, which is the supply crunch where SpaceX is effectively, maybe not outright said it, but no more transporter missions after another couple of years. They have thousands and thousands of compute satellites and Starlink satellites to put up, and they need to focus on their own capacity. Where do you think the market is today? It does play into some of your thesis from the early days, but I'm curious, where do you see the market today and how big of an issue is it? So, you know, I've asked a similar question to Eric Romo at Impulse, and he said this publicly actually multiple times, that he thinks the industry screwed in a lot of ways, at least for the short term.

40:40Andy Lapsa: But what is your kind of thoughts on that? Well, I said it before. I think it's an incredibly important moment for us as a civilization to not screw up. You look at the rise and falls of civilizations over time. You get these pinnacles of just incredible ingenuity and sophistication and breakthroughs in science and technology that advance our civilizations, increase the standard of living just so much. And then they crumble and fall. If you think about, I mean, I'm getting a little, I guess, philosophical, but. I like it. All right, we'll run with it. If you think about the incredible sophistication you need in the economy so that people like you and I can sit here in front of a microphone and talk about space transportation, there's an incredibly complex economy underneath us that allows us the quote unquote free time to not worry about survival and where my next meal is coming from and do this instead.

41:45right it's incredibly and and the longer you can make that the case and the more people in the you know the world the civilization that you can extract away from like dealing with pure survival and thinking about this other stuff yeah like the more productive we'll be and the longer we'll be able to go and i think we should all like realize that it can all can come tumbling down for reasons that we can't project so let's maximize this moment while the economy is there to support us can do it. Okay. So I got off on a tangent. I think you've seen, even in the space industry, you've seen kind of these cycles come and go within the space industry, right?

42:30Like you had this big ramp up to Apollo driven by the cold war. One thing I learned in this industry, doing a lot of trade studies with a lot of big ideas and big thinkers is that just about anything you can come up with, not only did somebody think of already in the 60s, but they actually went and built and tested it. Almost everything. The heat shield thing is like one of those rare exceptions, I think.

42:59Andy Lapsa: I was going to ask you actually earlier, I was going to say, if you could point to two or three pieces of technology that you think are truly innovative at Stoke, what would those be? I think a lot of our IP and our secret sauce is in how we do the heat shield and integrate it in with the rest of the engine. It's not the first liquid-cooled heat shield concept that there's been. It's the first that I've seen where it's highly integrated with the rest of the vehicle and has an efficient system-level solution like that. Okay, hold on. I'm getting back. Let's go back. Okay, so we have these different cycles.

43:30They come and go. You saw Constellation Ideas in the 90s, Teledesic, right? but electronics were still heavy and expensive and there was no launch so it's a great idea

43:44Andy Lapsa: and cellular innovation was happening at the same time and cellular innovation started to happen right so you had this like that's kind of like the first moment where that i know of that humans are like hey like we can actually have connectivity from space you know through a low earth orbit constellation, but the industry wasn't there yet. We tried again in the teens, right? Like Starlink wasn't the first constellation conceived. There's some other like projects, but like OneWeb was there first with satellites, but struggled to deploy because they didn't own the rocketry. and Starlink took over that narrative in a lot of ways because they have their own launch, right?

44:35In any case, we talked about the kind of like the investment cycle on the end of the teens. We talked about the business models that a lot of these satellite companies had and how that struggled to be realized. And you saw a huge pullback in investment from what I would say, you know, well, COVID kind of triggered a lot of investment pullback, right? Like everybody's just concerned about what in the world is going on in the world. I need to keep my portfolio companies alive. So that happened. That was the start of the pullback. And then interest rates rose. You didn't see any IPOs from 22 to 24.

45:10Growth capital froze. And a lot of those companies struggled. And so we've already kind of gone through that cycle in the very recent term. And we're on the upswing again. A lot of excitement, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of investment coming into satellite companies. constellations applications but we don't have launch launch is not solved yet how does exactly

45:32Andy Lapsa: one company who has lunch right well okay so so going back to when you started stoke let's just talk about that for a second because like we went from it we went from an industry where every like launch was so accessible every well everyone thought we thought costs were gonna cost were gonna come down substantially to you know we went from there not that long ago to now everyone's panicked about launch. How did that happen? Well, I think they, you know, they had some confirmation bias. They saw SpaceX do it. They assumed that this is easy. Everybody's going to do it now. And they just kind of assumed it was done, but it wasn't done.

46:07That's why we started the company. First of all, it wasn't done. It wasn't replicated in the way that it was. And even what was done is so far from the end state that this journey is barely beginning. Right. And so that was what we saw back then and the problem that we wanted to solve. The fact that we're far away from the end state still is not a slight on what's been done. It's just unbelievable what SpaceX has been able to done with Falcon. But that should be energizing. Like we're like as an industry, we still have so far to go.

46:41Andy Lapsa: That makes it fun. Did you ever when you were starting Stoke, did you ever think about a different type of model other than, you know, pointy part goes up, fiery part goes down in terms of getting to orbit? Did that cross your mind at all? Certainly, no. Not pointy end up, flamey end down. That, I think, we had high conviction in. Yeah.

47:10Maybe the part that we certainly, you know, thought long and hard about and worked hard on was do you want on the return side, do you want the flamey end down?

47:23Andy Lapsa: Yeah. And that's tricky. So like that, a big part of the problem. So like upper stage engines have usually have these like huge engine bells that are very, very thin. It's almost like tin foil thickness. And they certainly if they come in, we're saying flamey end down, but engine side down first with that kind of an engine. There's no way it will withstand the aerodynamic forces. And so that's why you see shuttle, well, among other reasons, but shuttle protects its engines on its way back down. You see Starship have a nice shroud around and it comes belly first to keep those protected. And so that's a problem that we wrestled with quite a bit.

48:12and the challenge for us and how we designed this vehicle was how do you bury a very high-performing rocket engine nozzle into a base heat shield? Because if you can, and if you can bring it in base first, then you can avoid a lot of complexities associated with coming in belly first, doing this complicated flip. There's cryogenic fluid management you have to deal with. There's boil off. There's keeping the engines fed. and preventing them from ingesting bubbles. There's all this kind of complexity that you have to deal with if you're gonna do a complicated maneuver like that. And if you can just keep the base end down first, then all you have to deal with is the acceleration vector in one direction.

48:59It's always in the same direction. It can make a lot of things easier.

49:03Andy Lapsa: What do you think about the thought of being payload agnostic? And just to kind of frame that, So a lot of launch companies have sort of the new model now is let's try and solve launch. And then once we've solved launch, we need to go into other things and buy up our supply chain or start an application layer. And then you have an issue where the application layer that you're building is fighting with your own payload capacity, which is ultimately hurting the broader market. Where do you think, where do you guys stand on that? Well, first of all, I'm obviously bullish on the overall space economy.

49:41And I think there are many different verticals that are super exciting and will happen, provided that you have low cost available launch. And so I'm extremely bullish in general on the overall economy in space. I think that at the moment, there are a number of very well capitalized and very important large-scale constellations that need to get off the ground. It would be, I'll just say, ambitious to try to replicate those projects internally. And I'm very happy to be payload agnostic and serve those customers that exist today, have great business cases and business models today, provided they can get up.

50:31I think there's a lot of value in building a great launch company and using the market to challenge us and force us to fly more and more and more frequently at a lower and lower and lower cost basis. Really energized by solving that problem for those customers. As we do that, and as other verticals begin to emerge in space and make sense in space, I think it would be silly to say that we're not interested in, you know, moving into some of those verticals ourselves, things that are uniquely addressable by our particular vehicle. And I think there are a handful of those things on both the government and on the commercial side.

51:17And so we may choose to do that. But for us right now, I think the biggest value thing that we can do, not only for the near-term market, but for our long-term prospect as a company is is, you know, unstick this bottleneck of launch. Yeah. Do it in a way that's, you know, fundamentally changes the economics of space.

51:39Andy Lapsa: Now, imagine for a second, you know, your media production team aren't standing in front of us right now. We're sitting in your backyard, hanging out, you know, grabbing a drink. Yeah. And I'm like, hey, Andy, like, you know, what's a cool application layer for a rocket to get into? Like, you know, if we're just brainstorming here, Like, let's throw out some ideas. What are some ideas? You like how I spun that question, by the way? Just so you know, there is a media team here. No, they give me free reign. Let's think about how to build, what needs to be in place to build a robust emerging market.

52:22Let's start there. Because again, I think like, don't like, let's build a really solid foundation. So what does an emerging market need to have in place? I think that right now is very much the Wild West in space, especially in deep space, which Block 2 is going to be great at, by the way. And it's very important to establish rules of the road, rules of engagement, standards of good behavior in space so that good, solid, robust commercial markets have well-understood rules and stability. And if you don't have those two things, it's very hard to develop a robust economy. I think we have plenty of examples of that all around the world and through history.

53:18So to me, it's important that we have good, robust rules of engagement and ways to enforce those rules so that a commercial and capitalistic economy can emerge in space. I think that's really, really, really important. And so there's a number of applications and a number of things that are required to basically set that up. And so I'm excited about being able to serve that mission in a number of different ways with some of the unique capabilities and the unique technologies that we're developing here. So that's a market that I'm real excited about, and I think it's going to be increasingly important over the next decade.

54:05I think that what we talked about, you know, comms, energy production, you know, data production, data management, data flow, that's kind of comms as well. Situational awareness is increasingly important, both commercially and from a, you know, kind of a government perspective. I think manufacturing applications, biopharmaceuticals, material science, certain materials fabrication, medical devices, timing, crystals, manufacturing. The broader idea of manufacturing in space is one that there have been a relatively small number of experiments with an extremely high hit rate. If you look at the volume of experiments, extremely low.

54:56But if you look at the hit rate of ideas that actually panned out that we cannot do on the ground and in gravity, it's like, like you should be very excited about that in order for them to work and make sense in a commercial setting. And even from an R and D setting, you need launch, you need delivery to be a regular part of the supply chain. And that means rockets are coming and going with aircraft like regularity. Oh man, I could just go on and on and on. And it just depends on what time horizon you're willing to think of. All of that was in low Earth orbit or medium or geosynchronous orbit for some of the government applications and comms applications.

55:38Andy Lapsa: Well, for the space economy to be bigger than the global economy, we're eventually going to have to. Yeah, you got to keep going. So let's do that. Then you have lunar economy, which there are elements and unique aspects of the moon that are super interesting, both in terms of resource mining, harvesting capabilities. You have one sixth Earth gravity where certain applications are very interesting. It's certainly a stepping stone and then jumping off point to other more deep space things. So I'm of no illusion that I think this is going to happen before 2030 or something. But given enough time and given enough rockets, we're going to move to that point.

56:22There's no question in my mind. Mars is kind of the next one. Mars is intense and the transit to Mars, it's an intense environment. So I think we've got a lot of human factors to think about before that is super, super viable. But robotics is taking off. we didn't talk about um human transportation um and tourism and and other elements like that like i think i think there's a very very real market there i think um well it sounds like you're

56:54Andy Lapsa: building a safer architecture to bring living things down we talked a lot about cost structure and availability but actually there's a third pillar of any transportation logistics thing that you care about. Okay. When you, no matter how trivial the thing is, the transportation logistics that you're asking for, it could be Uber Eats or whatever, right? You're going to care about how much it costs. You're going to care about when it's going to get there. And you're going to care about the fact that it actually gets there. In other words, reliability, right? If you had a system, okay. our industry every single calendar year back to 1980 which is like after infant mortality like the early industry between 2 % and 8 % of all attempts to reach orbit globally fail that's a terrible terrible record yeah it's a terrible record it's really bad yeah but interestingly it's pretty in line with like the you're familiar with Lemon Laws for automotive right like it's like low single digits lemons come out and then you go and get whatever fixed under warranty and then you keep going right but like it's around that number and what i posit to you is like we don't have the luxury of stopping bringing the car back to the shop and getting whatever fixed out yeah we blow up yeah that's how rockets fail yeah yeah okay so uh i would say like it's going to be really hard to get better reliability than that if you are not using flight proven hardware time and time again.

58:30And what I think is really, really cool statistic is we have the data as an industry now, thank you to SpaceX, where their first stages are like, I mean, they have not failed to meet mission in hundreds of flights in a row now. And the small number of failures that they do have to reach orbit have been second stage anomalies that are fresh out of the factory. So full rapid reuse is not only cost, it's not only availability, but I think it fundamentally changes reliability as well. And you can finally start thinking about multiple nines on reliability, and that changes the nature of human spaceflight as well.

59:10Andy Lapsa: We haven't talked about one application layer or one application, which is compute really in detail, and we don't have to, but I do have a question for you. And I was going to ask you what advice you would have for a new launch provider. But in a way, we do have one now, which is like Cowboy Space Corp wants to build a full rocket with a very unique second stage that effectively has its compute capabilities built into the second stage. What advice do you have for a company like that that's basically starting in a way from scratch to build a whole new type of launch vehicle? like at well it's a in 2026 it's a tough industry you know like uh and it and it takes some doing um but what i would say is uh in terms of the compute there's economics of compute on the ground there but um and and i would say like if those economics are going to go at parity with compute on orbit then you really do need full rapid reuse to lower the cost structure so that the cost structure of compute on orbit can be on par with the cost structure on the ground.

1:00:21So I would say that for the whole broader topic of compute on orbit, like you need full rapid reuse. A bet on compute is a bet on full rapid reuse happening in my mind. With maybe a caveat, And that caveat is the existential nature of more compute and the increasing challenge of power availability, regulation, permitting. Computes, you can't just drop it anywhere and have everybody happy. It's putting a strain on the grid, all of these things, right? and so if you want to control your dependency and decouple yourself from those constraints then Orbit is a great place to do it it will initially be at a higher cost structure but you free yourself from those constraints so that's kind of the way that I would put the context in there but long term long term I think that application needs full rapid reuse 100 %

1:01:24Andy Lapsa: what keeps you up at night? well it's just so damn exciting to do all of the things we just talked about. Getting this rocket out the door keeps me up at night in a good way. Fundraising keeps me up at night also in a good way. Seems like you've done a pretty good job though. I think any success that we've had fundraising is a direct translation to the success and the quality of the team that we've been able to put together and what they've been able to achieve. I mean, we've raised a lot of money now. And so that comes with an extreme responsibility that I hope everybody in our company feels.

1:02:01We certainly haven't spent nearly close to the amount of money that we've raised. So we're in a really good, solid position going forward. And I think that it's important to understand that if you get sloppy, that money can go quickly. So it's important to keep our eyes on the prize and keep focused on execution. And that's what this team is all about. And I think that's why that's the reason that we've been successful. It has nothing to do with me.

1:02:33Andy Lapsa: Well, I'm not going to ask you what success looks like for mission one or for the first full flight. What I am going to ask is if that flight goes perfectly and you get to orbit and you land. It's going to be a good day, by the way. I'm sure you'll feel pretty good. But what is that? I mean, what is the next, what is the second day look like? Like, if you nail everything. We've got the second vehicle already in production behind us. We're going to learn, no matter what happens on that first flight, we're going to learn what we're going to learn. I'm sure even if it's, you know, mission success, there's going to be adjustments that we want to make going from flight one to flight two.

1:03:15so we're not naive from that perspective um if we are the first people if we are full mission success we'll be the first entity that i know of in history to successfully hit mission on the first try with the first rocket yeah so that's now um in fairness there is another company that was on that path and then the flight was terminated kind of accidentally so that sucks that sucks but it still remains true that if we do it we'd be the first company uh to do it for the first try um so i think we have you know kind of a realistic understanding of uh of what that first flight looks like and the whole company is built on the thesis that we're going to get out to the pad, whether it's an engine or a component, we're going to do our best to analyze that within the timeframe that we have.

1:04:17And then we're going to get out and test and we're going to iterate quickly. And the whole company is designed around the thesis that it is less expensive, less costly, and therefore less burdensome to fail if we always have one in the chamber ready to go, and if the cost and the time of production is minimized. So we can go through this iteration cycle very, very quickly and with low impact, as low as impact as possible. So that's the way we think about it. And then, okay, so your actual question was, what if it's successful? The next flight, we go back to orbit. it. We're going to, the first flight is actually headed out of the earth gravity.

1:05:00So it's not coming back by intent. And I think that that's a statement of the performance that we have on the rocket engine and the rest of the vehicle.

1:05:09Andy Lapsa: Because so far, you've been kind of throttling the Zenith capability, right? It's a... Maybe throttling isn't the right word, but... Yeah, I would say We've sandbagged it. Sandbagged, sure. Is a better way to say it. Again, this is the highest performing rocket engine architecture that you can possibly have. Right. Even while sandbagging, it's one of the highest performing rocket engines ever made. And, but it has a lot of headroom to grow in terms of performance. We've already tested out some of that on the stand already. We're gonna like tie up the bow on the qualification engines. And then we're gonna like go into the max and see what happens and see where what breaks first uh yeah so um the second flight the first flight gets up and out the second flight we demonstrate you know capabilities on orbit in order to give ourselves confidence that we can re-enter uh and then the third flight is all like everything's perfect and the third third flight we're hoping to then demonstrate that re-entry and demonstrate the heat shield and all those things.

1:06:17We'll see how it all plays out. We have, like I said before, even with Series D, that's exclusive of the follow-on D2 and the Series E. That round funded multiple flights to orbit, and we have multiple vehicles in production, so we're just going to keep going. When should we expect the first flight of Block 2? Of Block 2? So we are targeting 2029. a lot of the stuff that we have the systems on and the manufacturing methods we have on pathfinder transferred directly into block two and um and i think we've got a pretty good plan together and and now we're kind of unlocked to go execute amazing that's the fun part all right so i got

1:07:01Andy Lapsa: one more question all right you didn't answer last time i asked you last time we had a conversation like this i asked you didn't answer me which was like in the movie about stoke which will you know full-length feature film maybe five ten years from now we'll be in theaters who's playing andy lapsa in that movie i failed to do my homework on this um and i'm also i like i live like all the way under a rock so i'll just say start out with that way i don't know kyra you got any suggestions you see you like ashton okay so i've heard ashton a couple times. And Ashton's great. Yeah. Not a bad one. Not a bad one.

1:07:45I think he's also played

1:07:46Andy Lapsa: Steve Jobs. Yeah. So yeah, there you go. Yeah. I would love to have Ashton. He's a great guy. He's now an investor in Stoke. And we're excited about that as well. So Ashton's a good choice. Awesome. All right. Well, actual last question. What do you do for fun? And don't say what I do for fun is build rockets. What do you do? Not space related. What do you do for fun? Look, I love my work. I spend a lot of time working. And it is fun for me. And that's why we're doing this. But outside of work, you get you get the best ideas when you can kind of reset your brain and cut away. And for me to be able to do that, I need something intense happening.

1:08:26or else like my brain my brain is thinking about rockets so i would say this i have my work which i love i have my family which i also love and they have you know my kids and and family have like really intense hobbies as well which they love and i love being a part of and then outside of that um i love mountain biking i love skiing i love soccer uh you know kind of sports that um you're working hard enough and sweating where you just don't have room in your brain to think about right and it's resetting we'll have to play soccer one day i'm

1:09:05Andy Lapsa: not gonna i'm not gonna take you up on the mountain biking but i'll take you up on the soccer you should come up we go mountain bike man it's it's a ton of fun i've gone mountain biking i went mountain biking once to up to jupiter peak in in in park city utah okay it was my very first time mountain biking my friend my friend there's this race that happens there called mofo it's like for charity. And I did it. It was a good cause. And I was like, it was my first time on a mountain bike. It was incredibly dangerous because not the going up part, the going down part. And then afterwards, I told everyone, I was like, yeah, that was my first time.

1:09:35Andy Lapsa: Everyone was like, you're an idiot. That was my first and only time that I've ever run mountain biking. So maybe I'll try it again. Yeah, mountain biking, skiing, there's a lot of similarities and dynamics there. But happy to play soccer with you. Let's do that. That'll be a little easier. Andy, thanks so much. This is a real treat. Pleasure. Thanks so much for coming out there. And likewise, excited to see the first launch. Not too, not too long from now. Me too. Exactly. All right. Until then. All right. Cheers.