00:13:46 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:13:46] S0: I I admire the commitment to the... To making the point. I assume you've done that before. [00:13:53] S1: All the time. Yeah. No. Like, your your phones are really robust. Like, you know... He's like, I've [00:13:57] S0: gone through, like, 14 different phones.
00:13:57 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:13:57] S0: gone through, like, 14 different phones. [00:14:01] S1: This is... It's... It was a little bit risky. This is a relatively new phone. I don't have a case on it. But my my old phone, I've done it. I don't... I can't even say how many times. But but the... But I also I would hold it six feet up and drop it on the concrete. Like cell phones are are pretty robust. They're designed to handle hundreds of g's repeatedly, and the worst that often happens is like your screen gets chipped. Right? The electronics inside that thing, it's never the case that like, I dropped my phone and the the CPU popped off the board or something, right? We're designing the system to keep the g loading less than a thousand g's, and so we think that basically at that g loading, the electronics will have no problem surviving. That's that's, I would say, non controversial. The things that would be challenging is if you've got some geo sat might have giant solar panel wings on it that extend out. The largest geo sets, their wings extend out larger than a seven forty seven. So if you're gonna have these like, colossal deployables that are weight optimized and, you know, ephemeral things, like, yeah, those, you're probably gonna have to put some gussets on that. Or like, you know, make it out of steel instead of aluminum or something like that. But the thing is if you have to bump up the mass of your mechanisms by 10 or 15%, and in exchange you can launch for an order
00:15:15 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:15:15] S0: of 80 Right, plus it's a trade off. Like if you were driving down the cost of launch, there is a marginal cost to make it launchable, right, again, the economics become physics problems. [00:15:25] S1: We have a dream that like if you wanted to do a moon lander, instead of like going and designing a moon lander, you take a John Deere tractor, rip out the gas motor, stick in an electric motor, and replace the rubber wheels with aluminum wheels or something, stick in a shipping container, and send it to the moon. Like, because that would be so much cheaper than, like, custom designing a specialized aluminum moon landing. No, when it's $50 a kilogram, who cares? It's twice as expensive to send it to space as it is to it to Europe. Who cares? Presumably, [00:16:03] S0: use in environments like the moon is also one of the advantages here, right? Where you can do even more with this sort of a concept and probably drive down the cost even more. [00:16:13] S1: Oh, if we put one of these things on the moon? [00:16:16] S0: Yeah, mean is that something you're considering?
00:16:16 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:16:16] S0: Yeah, mean is that something you're considering? [00:16:18] S1: I mean, I think it's totally possible. There's a lot of oxygen on the moon. You know, you have to bake the rocks to get it out. But you know, the thing, we're we're a gas based accelerator. So you know, space is not notorious for being full of gas. But but you know, the moon would be reasonable because, yeah, even with an oxygen based accelerator, you know, speed of sound of oxygen's in the neighborhood of 300 and something meters per second. So we could easily go, you know, a kilometer. Exit velocity from the moon is like a kilometer per second. So we could totally do something on the moon with oxygen. We don't need hydrogen on the moon.
00:16:52 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:16:52] S0: Okay so that kind of brings me to a topic. I think you kind of just went through and sort of experienced it in real time there, which is one of the things I like about Longshot story and the giant potato gun is it sounds a little bit like a high school science project. I mean that in the most complimentary sense, but then taken to its logical conclusion. But there is a mindset behind that that is sort of, I guess, like a beginner's or learner's mindset, which is to say it is a credulous and curious mindset instead of an incredulous skeptical one. And it seems like there are so many ideas where it's very easy for them to not happen because you describe it, you're like we're gonna make a giant 15 kilometer long space gun and we're gonna shoot stuff into space. And like to most people that just sounds like, no you're not. That's insane. And then someone, if you are the type of person who can be like, let me do some math. [00:17:56] S1: What's the next step? What's the first thing I would need to figure out?
00:17:56 · Nato Saichek, Jonathan Brebner
[00:17:56] S1: What's the next step? What's the first thing I would need to figure out? [00:17:59] S0: Which is true of most founders, That is what founders do is they stop and they go, but wait, maybe it'll work. Right? And then you convince a few people, but most people go like, no, you're not correct. But you experienced this with your co founder. I understand it, right? Because originally your co founder, my research suggested, saw some version of like a TED Talk from the guy who ran the HARP program. Yep. Jonathan was like, this sounds cool, why don't we try to do that again? And then was friends with you and called you up and said like, I wanna build a giant space gun and you went. [00:18:35] S1: So talk to [00:18:36] S0: me about that process.