00:28:53 · Nato Saichek
[00:28:53] S1: So I think we initially, I think we actually overestimated the amount that early investors would care about technical diligence. Once we had a physical thing that we had built, we demonstrated we have a team here, we can build stuff. We had a Air Force grant, so we were able to convince somebody that this thing was not completely useless. Mike is... Can tell this part of the story way better than I can, because he he was the one making the phone calls, and if somebody had technical questions, then he would drag me in. But that was almost never. He would call and get kicked in the teeth for hours, for weeks, hundreds of calls to potential investors. Either they didn't care about space launch, they only cared about short term weapon applications for blah blah blah, Or they didn't care about weapon applications, they only cared about space launch. And then we're a tiny little company in a garage. We don't have, you know, how long is it gonna take us to build a space launch? Well it's gonna be more than four years, and that's the horizon over their investment horizon, so forget about it. So he got kicked in the teeth repeatedly by tons of investors for a whole bunch of reasons. Almost never, I think there's maybe one investor who, like, we couldn't... They they were gonna invest, but they we didn't give them the the technical, enough technical credibility. I think mainly when... If an investor would come over, and they would see, we have the team here, they're working hard, there's people out there, they're cutting metal, they're grinding, we're doing a test shot. You you know, the... It's that when you... If we have an investor visiting
00:30:29 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:30:29] S0: Yeah. [00:30:29] S1: We tried to line that up with test shots. Because if they get to push that button and feel that That's pretty good demo. Yeah. It's a oh man, there's nothing like it. So it's great to be able to show people the things you're working If you're doing a, yeah, b to b SaaS company or something, and you're like, oh, look at this cool dashboard that we have or some... It's like... It's different than if you say, look, here is a giant concrete tunnel, 20 feet by 20 feet, 300 feet long, and inside it is the world's largest gun. And over here is the control system for it, and like, you know, like, you can crawl down the barrel if you want. Your hands will get dirty. Like, it's a very different thing to walk next to it and hear the echo of the space around you. And and, you know, you can see the the weld beads and the slag and the, you know, all the, like, the... It's a it's a visceral physical thing. And there's so if you're considering doing hardware, there are rewards. Even if I don't have as many Git commits as as I used to, my GitHub history is is has a lot of blank spots now. I used to do a lot more software. But there's other rewards.
00:31:43 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:31:43] S0: It definitely is, yeah, I mean the flip side of you have to get people to believe is that once you get them over that first initial hump of incredulity. Once you get someone to be like, but maybe... And then you can be like, and we're building a space gun. The thing itself has so much more intrinsic, don't know, energy to it, in this case literally, but that it is a little bit easier to get someone excited about it. But that first step is often very different. Well it's interesting actually, this does fit with other examples I can think of, but it is counterintuitive that at least early on, are not as interested in the technical diligence. But then at a certain point, it's like, that kind of makes sense really early on. Right.
00:32:29 · Nato Saichek
[00:32:29] S1: Right. So some of the early investors are basically like, okay, and when you get to space, what are you gonna be doing? And we'd say things like, well, look, the the there are some cool weird things that this system enables that, like, first thing is, it's weird in that, like, traditional rocket, you get to pick the orbit that you're going into, if you're a customer. You wanna go into an orbit? You buy the rocket. It'll put you into that orbit. Our system is gonna be 10 or 15 kilometers long. We can't change the angle. It's it's pointed where it's pointed. It's gonna go into that orbit, which is in some ways a big restriction. But one of the ways we can sort of get over that, what that means is that like any customer who wants to put something up in a different orbit, are they are they shit out of luck? Well, one of the first things we could put up is like a whole fleet of space tugs. And we can refuel them for nothing because we have the cheapest access to space there is. So yeah, we'll shoot your satellite up and then we'll put you on a first class ticket to whatever orbit you want on a space tug that's not running some dinky ion thruster that's gonna take you six months to get there. We'll put you chemical all the way, buddy. We'll put you in your orbit in, you know, in fifteen minutes. No problem. And then we'll burn chemical back to that same orbit, and, and then we'll refuel it because it's because fuel costs nothing to put up for us compared to anybody else.
00:33:52 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:33:52] S0: I gotta be honest, I love... My reaction when you said space tug was like space gun, space tug. You're just taking kind of low tech, blue collar things and putting space in front of it. Right, yeah, tractor. Yeah, space tractor, right? But that is sort of part of the appeal here, is that yeah, you change the economics of it and suddenly you can do just fundamentally different things.
00:34:17 · Nato Saichek
[00:34:17] S1: The thing is, we are, like, this whole system is an infrastructure project disguised as an aerospace project. Like, the gun system, part of the reason it's so long is so that we can make it out of mild steel. There's no there's no titanium. I mean, on the vehicle there might be, but probably not. It'll probably be stainless steel and phenolic resin and carbon fiber. But the infrastructure is mild steel and concrete. We're gonna be buying stuff from the the pipeline industry. And when you think of like a 15 kilometer long aerospace project, you know, if you use SMAD, I don't know anyone knows this, Space Mission Analysis and Design is the the bible for aerospace engineers. There are tables in there that will tell you how to scope out every single possible kind of thing you can think of for aerospace. And if you use that book, it's gonna tell you, oh yeah, this thing is gonna cost you $5,000,000,000 to make. But but we're throwing that book out. Like, we don't do... We're not buying sensors from Honeywell. Like, we're not buying... I'll give an example. The pressure vessels, part of our magic sauce is that we we pop burst disks, and we have to pop them with exquisite timing. As the projectile goes by, the burst disk has to pop. And the projectile is traveling at eight kilometers per second. There's there's burst discs that release gas into the into the barrel. There's no valve that opens fast enough. The projectile is traveling eight and a half kilometers per second. If you have a gate valve that's, two feet in diameter, that's gonna take a couple seconds to open. So we need things that open in less than a millisecond. And so that's a very energetic process. And so we have a, I can't go into details on exactly how we do it, but I will say that it involves large amounts of electricity. We have a large capacitor bank and we switch and we dump power very quickly. And we, in in part as part of testing this thing, we had to get that power inside the pressure vessel to to get to the burst disc actuator. So we have a giant capacitor bank.