Adam Gilmour: We took the risk first. Then the government came.

0:00Everything has come out as I have foreseen it. and all the rules and regulations, you know, the government support, it's all as I foresaw it would happen. But you've got to go first. You know, you've got to take the risk first. Now, I could say we took the risk first because you guys invested in us first, but we took the risk first and then the government comes. I knew they would come. You know, stay tuned. We're going to be doing a lot more cool things. I promise you smoke and fire.

0:28Every space program looks inevitable in hindsight. Up close is wind limits, range safety, and a team playing an orchestra of pressures and valves with seconds to spare. Adam Gilmore built rockets from Australia before a space agency existed, before the regulations were ever written. Why? Because someone's got to go first. On July 30th, 2025, his rocket leapt from the pad for 14 seconds. Enough to prove the permits, the range, and the team that could make it possible. In rocketry, first flights rarely succeed. What matters is what you have de-risked. Adam de-risked the infrastructure, found the fault fast, and proved to a nation that Gilmore Space could build its own path to orbit.

1:15Gilmore Space is showing us, right in front of our eyes, how a sovereign space industry is born. If you care about how Australia goes from can we to we did it you'll enjoy this episode let's get into it with adam gilmore the founder and ceo of gilmore space take us back to the 30th of july 2025 this year yep it's launch day yeah what's going through your mind as you wake up yeah well look i'll take it back to the day before because the day before was our first crack at the launch. Yes. And the wind forecast said there was roughly a 50-50 chance that we could launch in the afternoon. So as a team, we said, let's go for it.

2:03And so we basically had an aircraft exclusion zone until I think 4.30 p.m. And so we got ready by about 2.30 p.m. the day before. And when I mean ready, it means T minus 10 minutes with everything loaded on the rocket and you're ready to go. And then we're sending balloons up. And we all go outside and see this balloon go up and then within about 15 minutes you get the first reading and within half an hour you get all the reading. And so the balloon goes up at like 2 o 'clock and the reading is it's slightly over the limit. We're like, damn it. Over the limit of what? The wind. The wind. Yeah.

2:44So you have a wind limit because if it's beyond that, the rocket might break up and fly all over the place. Yeah. You know, I can go on, but I won't. Yeah. And so we were launching balloons every half an hour. Yeah. And then so we launched another one at 2.30, and again it was just off. And then again at 3, and then again at 3.30. And when the 3.31 was off, we knew we'd finished. But I remember saying to – Rick was with us. I remember saying to Rick, this is good. we've never got this far into the launch countdown yeah you hear the voices they're calm they know what they're doing they're managing the rocket well we will launch tomorrow morning because the forecast for the next day was really really good so i was actually a lot calmer than i would have been on the day we launched and it's also the beauty of a team like you're getting more confidence because you're seeing the confidence that your team has yeah yeah yeah yeah the story i was going to tell was that in previous launch campaigns where we've had a crack and then not done it the story is we go through the day i go home i get up in the morning there's a team overnight working on the rocket and i come in in the morning and say what's going on and then you get the bad news right so when you rock up that's when the bad news is so you know on the day of the launch i rocked up reasonably expecting some bad news yes and i said to the the head of the overnight team anything to report and he said everything went really well and I was like wow that is awesome and then that was only two and a half hours until team minus zero so you were feeling excitement at this point not yeah I think definitely oh my gosh it's it's going to happen yeah yeah and just I think I'd moved even beyond excitement you know I was almost numb yeah wow and then what was really good is we had the chief engineer of the night team stayed obviously to watch the launch we had the whole mission control screens up inside we're in another building but we had all the screens up so we could see what they were seeing and we had the voice recording of what they were saying in real time so we could hear what they were saying and so the chief engineer was there plus some other engineers and they were just telling us what was going on in the rocket and it's the closest thing I can say is it's like an orchestra.

5:09You know, you've got three different oxidiser tanks, you know, fuel tanks, pressure tanks. You've got sensors on all of them and they all are moving around, you know, so something's getting a bit hot so someone can open up a valve and cool it down and so there's this dance going on where all the people in mission control are like, oh, got a pressure reading on this. It's going too high. We're going to get to the limit. someone else will say some violinist just screwing it up it's yeah it's okay i can turn this thing on that'll calm it down right yep because they've rehearsed all of this and so all of this dance is going on you just don't realize there's this dance and so we roll into the last 10 minutes and then the balloon goes up and the balloon's been going up and we've been getting we're good we're good we're good and so the you know the balloon went up again and you know we hear we're good the chief engineer spanish guy says we're good and so we're all getting excited then and then the next thing you do is you ask the range safety officer is the range clear are the aircraft away from the zones are the ships away from the zones and the range safety officers we are clear and so i was like this is it this is going to happen now and you know we got into the t minus 10 minutes and then time just went fast like i cannot remember those 10 minutes very well and the rocket has an automatic countdown sequence at t minus one minute where you basically roll it into the sequence everyone takes their hands away from everything and just watches everything because we can abort yeah it just watches so no one has to press any button or do anything or turn on a valve it's all fully automated and i remember very quickly we're in that t minus one minute and i was like what happened to the last nine minutes they just disappeared and then we burned down through that one minute again time was flying like 60 seconds i don't know how it just disappeared and then we just see smoke coming out of the rocket like good smoke yeah and then we know that the engines are supposed to turn on and thrust up for five seconds yeah and so it's going to be five seconds before minimum a lift off and we actually calculated it could take another eight seconds to get stable engine thrust out of all four engines before we lift it off so we're expecting to see a lot of smoke for a while and it just lifted off and again it just lifted off faster than you could have imagined it happening and it just went off and we were like you know holy yes It's like it's gone up, you know, and I let out this roar, like this, you know, this primeval, defiant, how's that all you doubt is roar.

7:55Yeah. And, you know, Rick was next to me and we were jumping up and down and then it didn't take long before we saw the rocket wasn't performing as great as we thought it was, but it was still flying and then very quickly we figured out it wasn't working. It came back down again. But, you know, that was just this euphoric moment where, you know, To see it, it leapt off the pad. I mean, it was mighty. All four engines were firing and it was just an amazing sight to see. And I was so happy. I was like, I'm going to see this again. I'm going to come back for the next one. We're going to have another crack.

8:28And it was just fantastic. In a way, it almost sounds like a huge sporting event, like the Olympics of your life. Oh, yeah. I mean, for me, that's a 100-meter sprint. That's the Usain Bolt moment. Yeah, and it was just like it was really good because only other similar event I've ever had was when we went from smaller hybrid engines to the big ones and we did the first test. When that thing went and worked, I knew in my heart we were going to make it, you know, because that was kind of key technology in the company. And when that thing roared and went off and did, you know, what it was supposed to do, that was one of those other moments where I'm like, I am sure now.

9:11And so this was the second one. It was flight for 14 seconds. Yeah. Has time slowed down in comparison to the prior 10 minutes? Are these the longest seconds you've experienced by comparison? It definitely went back into real time because we were fastidiously watching the rocket and then we noticed, okay, an engine's gone out, but we know the thrust to weight ratio is so good that it can even go up with three engines working instead of four. yeah and so i was like okay all right three engines it'll start accelerating again because it burns fuel and it gets lighter so it can accelerate yes and then when we saw the second engine going we're like damn it yeah and then it started coming down again and i was like okay and the first thing i said somebody tell me how long that flew for because i know that that makes a difference how much flight time you get every second is good information and you know validating more systems and and so that was what we quickly established how how long did we fly if if we zoom out for a sec how likely or unlikely was that event in comparison to other space uh companies who are launching rockets are they meant to be succeeding the first time around well nobody does yes and nobody succeeds on the first time so how does 14 seconds compare it's pretty good like so we we lined up all the rocket companies of the world on the western world that have done their first launch attempts and we're right in the middle yeah you know there's a couple of them that either blew up on the pad on their first attempt or got one second of of engine burn time before failure a couple more that were eight to ten and then above us we're like 14 there's one that's like 20 and then a couple that are into the minutes because i think that's a it's an expectation that a lot of people don't know and it's just like you just see the the falcon um just do amazing things and then the assumption is oh everyone should should actually launch off the pad the first go like otherwise well i mean what's the point well spacex took four attempts to get to orbit yeah so they're kind of a laggard in the pack yeah so you know a few there were some times where i'm pitching to investors and i'm totally honest and i said you know this is good but you can see the best rocket company in the world took four goes some of the others took two and they didn't go very well so it's not like that's the only thing you care about when you're doing rockets yes how many times it takes you to get to space there's you're juggling a lot of other things as well it's just an indicator yes and so reflecting on the day still what were the expectations of the team how were their reactions how did you manage everyone yeah i mean i think everyone was happy because i kind of said to them i think we're going to get somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds of flight and i don't know how i came up with that number but i did it's a great bet and i said you know if we get off the pad yeah i want you to know that's a good result for the company so as soon as we get off the pad it's a good result for the company and so there were definitely some people that you know were disappointed we didn't fly further chief engineer one of them like i think he was pretty disappointed we didn't get more flight time but the majority of them were so happy that it got off the pad and you know the rocket had been up there for so long it wasn't i call it the old clunker you know like it had been up there for 18 months you know if you if you left your car up a kilometer away from the ocean for 18 months there's a reasonable chance that when you drove it again something would go wrong right yeah and so But rockets are no different.

12:51Everything's probability adjusted. So for us, having an 18-month-old rocket up in the salt, getting off the pad, having 14 seconds of flight was really, really good. So what went wrong? 14 seconds. Yep. How did it? So to explain what went wrong, I have to explain some of the tech. So we have an electric-powered turbo pump in the main engines. and so you have a whole lot of batteries and the batteries are all direct current and so motors are alternative current and so you need this device called an inverter that inverts the current from direct to alternate. So we buy the motor and the alternator from a third party in Europe.

13:38They make them for buses. We said, can you modify them for rockets? So that inverter stopped working and we're trying to find out why it stopped working because we obviously tested it extensively before the launch and it worked. We've used it since the launch and it's worked. So we have to try to replicate, was there a condition in the launch either from heat or vibration or something, but we've even vibe tested it. There's something missing that happened in the launch that didn't happen whenever we were testing. so we're investigating that now but it's more difficult to do because it's a third-party system and so you're relying on the engineers on the on the other company to help you fix their thing because it's a black box to us we didn't do the firmware the software any of that stuff we didn't make it and so that makes the you know the investigation a lot harder and that drives me to make more and more of the rocket myself so i understand the technology but that's where we are now we're still investigating exactly why it went wrong we knew what went wrong within about 60 seconds of the of the failure we know why yeah why i mean it's now october why does it take this long to find the root cause well because you know you investigate a lot of things that might have gone wrong and it wasn't that so it's it's a real mystery like we have stress tested a lot of stuff and it still works so what percentage of the rocket is third party about 15 okay wow 15 20 max okay do you think by the time you launch again that number will drop to 10 percent the fourth rocket it'll drop to 10 or less percent okay yeah and i actually would have thought it would be a higher percent of the rocket well that's super high already yeah right yeah like how do you make the decision that actually this should be third party because when i mean you say it now out loud it's like oh it seems obvious that the more you own the better you will be it well because there's so much technology in a rocket yeah if you try it at the beginning to do everything you'd be another 10 years to the rocket got on the pad so you basically have to make decisions is that piece of technology really difficult if it is i'll buy it externally for a while to give me more time to develop the other bits of hard technology so that's one of our strategies and it's generally been working, it just gives you time.

16:11Like if there's 10 different super hard, high pieces of technology and you want to bite off six of them at a time or at once, leave the other four for later, that's not a bad strategy. There's pros and cons. Yeah. Surely it's in the third party's best interest to be like, here's what went wrong. Yeah, it is. And they're helping. They're trying to find out, but they don't even know. Like obviously they make it for buses, right? And so a bus doesn't have the same physics on it as a rocket. So they're a bit perplexed as well, but yeah. Is this a question of how long is a piece of string when it comes to diagnosing root causes in rocket failure?

16:50It shouldn't be. No, you should be able to find it pretty quickly. This is frustrating me that it's taken so long. But we're now getting to the point where we're going to try to replicate the flight conditions as best we can and see if we can uncover. Because one of the problems we had is, you know, the rocket fell on the ground, it caught fire. All of these inverters burnt. So we can't recover the data on them afterwards. We've got the data from the flight. So the next best thing you can do is replicate. And this is what rocket companies do. They try to replicate the failure again. And so we'll do that.

17:26In the next couple of months, we'll replicate the failure. And that's fine. I'm happy with that. What happens? This is just a weird question. I know that you weren't able to go to the site to collect the rocket. Have you now done that? Yes. And remind me why it took so long. Well, the space agency was deciding whether they needed to investigate or whether we did. And there's a nuance in the act where it's not crystal clear who does the investigation. Yeah. I mean, it is pretty clear, but it's not crystal clear. Yeah. And so we had a bit of an argument about who should investigate and that took about a month.

18:07But now that we've had the argument, everyone knows the rules now and so we won't have to do that again. This is like the problem of going first is you lay the ground, you lay the track work as you're moving along the railway, so to speak. What else matters? What did that 14 seconds of flight, what did that do for the company? Well, what it did, you know, and we say it now to a lot of people and they get it, is it meant we got a launch permit. We're the first Australian company to get a launch permit, first launch permit in Australia. It meant that we'd successfully cleared all the ranges. And that's a big deal.

18:49You know, you've got to keep all the aircraft out, all the ships out. And I was talking to the space agency in the weeks before, and I said, look, if we're going to scrub, we'll probably scrub because the range isn't clear. and that happens all the time in rockets. They scrub because some boat goes in or an aircraft flies mistakenly and you've got to stop. So we didn't have that. On the day before and the day, we had cleared ranges. So everyone was paying attention to the no-tams and the not-mars and staying out of the way, which was fantastic. So we proved all of that. All the ground systems, we proved.

19:27All the fluid systems, the umbilicals disconnect. there's one system we couldn't test until we launched, which is the hold down. So we've got these claws that hold the rocket down and that thing's punching out like 45 tons of thrust at liftoff. And there's four of these clams holding it down and they've got to let it go. And they've got to all let it go at exactly the same time or the rocket goes left or right. And so I was very nervous about that. And that just performed flawlessly. It was fantastic. Was that also there for 18 months? No, that had been there for about three or four months. And we tested it, but you can't test it unless you launch.

20:08And so all of the ground stuff, like the Americans call that stage zero. So all of our stage zero stuff performed great. And we're going to use that stage zero stuff for the next launch and the next launch and the next launch and the next launch. So once you've got all of that risk taken away, you can then just focus on the rocket. which is what we're doing. What has been the reaction, both from a customer point of view or partnership point of view, government point of view? What's been the reaction since the launch? Investors have been really, really good. Like I got texts from, you know, the bosses of Host Plus and Hester and, you know, NRF and all of that, like within minutes of the launch because I didn't know that.

20:52They were all watching. How good. And, you know, that was good to see. Yeah, that's great. Because, like, you're wondering, are they going to, you know, and they're like, this is fantastic, well done, blah, blah, blah. Customers thought it was great. Like I've just come back from Japan, landed this morning. So many people in Japan, I was at a space conference, came up to us and said, congratulations on your first launch. Even the Japanese government said that and they're launching all the time. Wow. So I think people knew it was a big deal to get your first attempt off the pad. Tim Ayers, the minister, said on the day, well done, mentioned us at least two more times in speeches.

21:28in the weeks since. Susan Coyle, who's the head of Space Command, I was so busy I didn't see the text, but she texted me again on the same day saying, well done, this was awesome to see. I responded about a week later, but I got a lot of texts that day. But people were paying attention. Like the people that have been watching us, they know what a big deal this was. And it's a giant leap forward in terms of an analogy to the moon. This isn't a small step, it's a giant leap. you know and what comes after this is small steps as crazy as that sounds you know when we get to orbit that's a small step from here in reality it's fixing about two or three systems on the rocket i'm hyped yeah so hyped you mentioned something a bit before i think like the time to ask that question is now but what why did you build hillmore from australia yeah i mean i got asked that at the and my quick answer was well i'm australian so why wouldn't i i did think about it i did think about going to the u.s or something like that but there's arms restrictions on launch vehicles and so i wouldn't actually even be allowed to run a rocket company in the u.s as an australian and so i automatically knew i couldn't start a rocket company in australia in america and so i I thought, you know, I know Australia.

22:58I know kind of the rules and regulations. I have a feel for the culture. I know what can happen. And I knew, like, you know, to put this into context, we started the company before there was a space agency and where the regulations pretty much prohibited launch in Australia. But I knew as we went forward, the rules would change. You know, I know this country's culture and I know when you're succeeding, they can change. And so I knew they'd change. Everything has come out as I have foreseen it in terms of, I mean, I wish the agency had more money, but everything else, all the rules and regulations, the government support, it's all as I foresaw it would happen.

23:43But you've got to go first. You've got to take the risk first. Now, I could say we took the risk first because you guys invested in us first, but we took the risk first and then the government comes. But I knew they would come. Well, that's actually far more positive that they have come. Yeah. And what does the IAF membership mean for you and the company? IAF is a premier space organisation and it's the only real organisation that has a really good mix between space agencies, companies commercial companies they look at human space flight quite a bit and so it's almost the best combination of all the different facets of space technology and so you know we're happy to be a member of the iaf because we do want to go through all of those facets we want to get into human space flight you know we want to be a big participant in the global community of space and IAF is a good way to do that.

24:50Was it hard to get in? What does it signal? I think it is hard to get in. It wasn't for us. I think because we got a good name and we've been around for a while. Yeah, but I didn't know how hard it was to get in until we got in and then I was asking people and they said, oh, it's actually very hard to get in and I said, okay, good. Well, my wife's done a good job. and switching gears a little bit because there was also another big milestone which we didn't talk about this part of the business on the last pod but you achieved a pretty special satellite milestone yeah and that was actually probably the month before it was yeah can you share what that milestone was how long you've been planning for it and what does that mean for gilmore space as the company?

25:40Yeah, so we built a 100-kilogram satellite and launched it on a SpaceX rocket. And then, you know, I'll preface this by saying about 60 % of every first satellite launch fails, never turns on. And so a bit like rockets, you know, first one normally fails. And so we'd spent about two and a half years, maybe three years on the satellite program, and this was the result of three years' worth of work. and, you know, have a satellite team, and, you know, we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this satellite, tested it extensively. But still, you know, I'm so used to failure that, you know, I probably thought it was going to fail, but whatever.

26:24I think I get sandbagged all the time by my engineers, so the team said, it will take about two weeks to find it and to tell itself to turn on. Wow. And we found it in about four hours, and it was turned on in six. that was really, really good news. And then... Why does it take two weeks? What's happening? Well, when you go up on SpaceX, there's about another 60 satellites that go off at the same time. Yeah. And then you've got to know pretty close where they are in space to direct a beam of RF signals to it to say hello. And so if you don't know very closely where it is, you're like shooting in the wrong way.

27:02Yeah. And then in the next month, you go through this thing where it's like a checkout where you're slowly turning on new systems. And so, for example, there's a system in the satellite that controls its orientation in space. There's these reaction wheels that spin up like a gyroscope. That's one of the last things that we turned on. And so for a lot, the satellite was tumbling. It was spinning around uncontrolled, but we could still communicate with us. And we were like opening up some solar panels. or in fact our solar panels can get solar before they open up. So we were getting power before we even opened them up, turning all the systems on, the computers, all that kind of stuff.

27:44And then we gradually over the month just turned everything on. And so that was fantastic because every day there was something else that worked and by the end of it everything had worked. I think there was one thing that took longer than we thought to get done but it got done and it still works. Like it's been 130 days now in orbit, still works. everything's working like we have readouts in the factory of its power cycles and the heating cycles and anyone can go down and have a look at these screens and you can just see these lovely ups and downs it looks like a heart rate monitor and it's the solar as it's going around the earth you know it's charging up and then going down and charging up so yeah we're really happy about that i mean for a satellite company that would have been a massive massive massive milestone but because we're a rocket company no one seems to give a shit and it's all about the damn rocket you know but you know the satellite business is going to be a big part of our business as well and you know when i go around the world and i talk to customers it's very nice to say to them hey i have a working satellite 100 kilograms on orbit right now you know that's very very powerful because in space you don't really get anywhere until you've proven the technology you know that's when you can pull out the i've been to space card and whack it on the table so we can do that now at least with the satellite and so that's good so that was a it was it was a great milestone overshadowed by you know the impending orbital launch but yeah we're still very very happy about that why why the decision to build that part of the business a lot of the decisions we make is like we either want to use a part or do something and we find out how expensive it is and we go it shouldn't be that expensive we'll just make it ourself and so we had some satellite companies specializing in this sensor yeah could be an infrared sensor could be a hyperspectral camera it could be a synthetic aperture radar whatever and then they spend three or four years doing that and then they've got to go and find the bus which is like the vehicle shell that has all the power and the computer and all that kind of stuff they were discussing with us them going out into the world and trying to find a bus and they were getting charged these ridiculously high prices you know one of them was almost the same as what our rocket costs and i remember saying to my guys you know how can a satellite that's as big as that table cost the same as an entire orbital launch vehicle there's no way so i think you know these guys are having the market over yeah and so we said you know if we make the bus and make it a lot cheaper you can put your sensor on the bus and then you can afford to launch on my rocket because that was killing the market because the companies were spending so much money on the bus itself they didn't have any money left to launch the damn thing and so you can do the maths right if you've got like i'm going to do fast maths here i might stuff it up but let's say you got 30 million dollars and the satellite cost$10 million each and the launch cost$10.

30:49So you can kind of build one satellite and launch one and you've got$10 million left. If you can build the satellite for$3 or$4 million and launch two of them on one rocket, which you can, you could probably build three or four of them plus the launch and have four times as many satellites up for the same amount of money if the bus is cheaper. And that's the maths we did. And so we just said, let's do this. Let's kind of normalize the market and take the excessive revenue spread out of that side of the business. And it seems to be working. Are you currently getting paid by a customer for that satellite?

31:25Or is that your own test? That was our test. But we now have contracts. We now have contracts with customers that have contracted us to build satellites for them. And we've got a really strong pipeline. I think in the next three or four months, we'll probably have another three or four satellite bus contracts. which is going to keep the team busy. And what are the primary use cases? Primarily earth observation. So either it doesn't matter the sensor and there's a lot of different applications. So it could be for monitoring vegetation. So one of the customers has contracts with Southeast Asian nations to monitor massive swathes of land that are vegetable crops.

32:08and with certain cameras you can tell if the vegetables need water or if they're heat stressed. They give off a different kind of colour in the hyperspectral colour and so with a few satellites you can look at thousands of square kilometres of farmland and transmit it back to the farmers. Hey, you've got to water this area or you've got to fertilise that area and so that's one application. That's extreme resolution. Yeah, it's fantastic. There's just so many uses for space technology. that are still, it's like the internet. You know, core technology is there. What are the applications? And there's just more and more and more applications now for this technology.

32:48And I'm always astounded when some satellite company comes up and says, I've got this sensor, I'm doing it for this application and I'm getting paid this much money from all of these people around the world. And I'm like, wow, that's cool. Next year, you're on the pod, same time. How many launches have happened? Well, we've got a suborbital one next. Can't say much more than that. And then our next orbital attempt will be around the middle of the year. And we're going to start building the third orbital vehicle now so we can have another attempt at the end of next year. So that's what I want to do.

33:24And can you share a bit more about how the launches can accelerate rather than one launch per year? So how are you going from one this year to two next year? is the limiting factor just capital or no it's not capital it's it's pesky engineers is the top level answer to that but if i become a bit more serious when you're more confident on the design of the vehicle you can start building a lot of them and what you don't want to do is go and tell the manufacturing go and build three of these first vehicles and then you launch them and they've got a problem and you're like oh you know so we're trying to manage that you know we want to take some risk but we don't want to make three first of tight before you fly you've got to kind of like learn as you go and then get to a point where you're reasonably comfortable and we're close to that i think we're close to a point where we can start making rockets at at scale but definitely after the next launch we'll be in a much much better point to have confidence to say okay i could make the next five vehicles now and i'll have to make some changes but they won't be big.

34:32Is there a world where you IPO on the ASX? Yeah, I mean, I don't think we'll solely IPO on the ASX. I think we're talking to the ASX, talking to the American stock exchanges. We can dual list. They've even said we can dual list at exactly the same time. That's cool. We probably want to do that because the Americans understand space and they understand the valuations and they understand the life cycle of a rocket company. And so I want to be able to tap into to those investors, you know, for the long-term future of the company. But I also would like to be on the Australian stock market because a lot of supers are invested in us already.

35:08They can invest in us over there, but it'd be great if they invest in, you know, there's got to be more good Australian companies on the ASX. I love that. Is there anything we haven't spoken about that we should? I've hit the four core areas and I know we don't have a lot of time. You know, stay tuned. It's going to be in a wild ride. You know, we're going to be doing a lot more cool things. I promise you smoke and fire.

35:35And so I watched the launch on YouTube. Oh, we're going to live stream it. So you're going to get a commentator this time around? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a mistake. That was definitely a mistake. I mean, what a hero for doing it. Oh, yeah, no, the guy, look. Who is he? He's, you know when you ask someone the name Josh. No, no, that's okay. We brought him out to the factory the week before the launch because he was coming up for every launch attempt and he's been to the factory before. So he's a friend of Gilmore. Yeah. And he came and saw the rocket and took photos next to it and all that kind of stuff.

36:06Yeah, and it was very authentic. Yeah. But we'll live stream with the close-up videos and people will get to see it. What is the team size now and what will the team size be next year? We're about 240 now, I think, next year. We don't want to go crazily. I think we'll be about 260. I want to limit the size of the team until we get to orbit. Why does that matter? Cost. Cost. Yeah. You just headcount's the biggest burn, the cash burn. So we're near what we need to be. I think we've got a little bit more hiring to do to fill out some specialist skill sets that we need. Yeah. We've got enough manufacturers to make three to four rockets a year already.

36:46Yeah. So I think we're not going to go crazy with headcount unless we get a good order. Like if we get a big order out of Japan, I've got no choice. I've got to hire. I've got to build. and I really hope that happens. But yeah, if we don't, if we're just going on steady state, then 260 is about it until we go to orbit. How productive is the Gilmore team? And productive in like how much output do you deliver, do you achieve for the input of the team? Like I want to understand, is it smoke and fire or smoke and mirrors or is there actually a truly special team up the coast? Yeah, we talk about that a lot in the company.

37:24And I think when we frame our company's headcount against previous rocket companies when they're getting up to their first launch attempt, they don't have a working satellite in orbit. They don't have a hypersonic team as well. If you compartmentalise those other teams, you could have 30 or 40 people in either of those teams. So we got to the pad with 230 headcount, a working satellite and an almost finished hypersonic vehicle. that's super productive and when we say that to like foreign governments and foreign investors they cannot believe it they cannot believe that we've done that with so few so few people and so yeah we're definitely punching above our way on producing tech some people in my team think i'm crazy but it's working yeah yeah yeah i mean what you and the entire team are doing up there is like one of the most patriotic uh missions that we have to offer and i think it's just like it perfectly captures so much of the aussie dna where we do punch above our weight and when we do we can do extraordinary things and we just have to believe and you guys are trailblazing that way so soon and we said off screen you'll be doing the moon walk on the moon yeah which i'm pumped by I would never do that, but I'm glad you would.

38:51Yeah, I'm happy to go to the surface of the moon. My wife won't be, but if I'm 60 and I've done everything I want to do, I'm happy to take the risk and it'll be great. But I'm happy just to go around it as well. But I think if I go around it, I'm going to want to land on it, but that's fine. Is it really that much of a difference to be, I guess it probably is to be landing on the moon versus just different capability. Oh, it's just so much harder to land on the moon. So much more energy to get down and back off the surface. getting around is relatively easy okay relatively easy alright so what's the timeline for Gilmore to be taking than himself I'd like to say 10 years from now I'd like to give a challenge to our company that we can have a human spaceflight capsule that goes around the moon and comes back again I think it's possible I really do it's amazing thank you for coming back pleasure we'll see you next time great thanks Mason

39:45Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn more from other ambitious people building, designing, and creating the world that we all want to live in, then please hit the subscribe and follow button. It would mean the world to us, the founders, the operators, and the investors who join us on Wild Hearts. This podcast is a labor of love from the Blackbird team and day one. the show is produced by camilla herring and melia reyner at blackbird our marketing genius is eva telemacos and our editors are from day one annie jones and sanjay chabaria thank you all so much for listening we'll see you next week