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.
00:36:20 · Nato Saichek
It's gonna be dumping 100,000 amps at three and a half kilovolts in ten microseconds and we need to somehow get that power from normal air through the wall of a half inch thick steel pressure vessel, and that feed through that's gonna be carrying all that power needs to handle the power, and it needs to survive a thousand psi pressure on it, and it needs to be super robust and reliable. And so you might think, oh, well, where are you gonna get one of those? What's that feed through? What does that feed through look like? If you went to go try and buy one of these, I don't know if it's possible to buy them. We didn't even bother trying because we thought they would be hundreds or thousands of dollars. And instead, we went down to Home Depot and we got we got a one inch diameter NPT fitting, just a threaded fitting, and we put it on a block of wood, drilled a hole, and put a giant piece of copper right through the center of it, and then filled it with epoxy. And and we we scuffed up the copper a little bit with some sandpaper. And then we took this this... It's a NPT fitting with a rod of copper running through a, you know, surrounded by epoxy. We stuck it in a pressure vessel. We pressurized it to like 1,500 psi to prove that it can handle higher pressure. We did a couple of capacitor discharges through it to make sure that it wouldn't destroy itself. And then we started using them. It was literal literally $5 in parts and you know, ten minutes of technician time to build them for a part that would be incomprehensibly expensive if you tried to buy it off the off the shelf. You know, we we got rid of all the ridiculous requirements that other people might have, and said, we need this tomorrow, and and made it. I don't know, we did that... I can't even say... We did that for a 100 different things on on the prototype.
00:38:10 · Jonathan Brebner, Nato Saichek
[00:38:10] S0: Yeah. Kinda the classic just you can just do things. [00:38:12] S1: Yeah. Totally. [00:38:14] S0: And that's how you make a space gun. I wanna end with a question that I've been asking guests here recently which is a lot of advice that people give in startups functionally adds up to just that plain survivor meme. It is sort of just packaged survivor bias that sounds good and makes [00:38:37] S1: you [00:38:37] S0: feel good because it makes you feel like, oh, now I have the knowledge and my problem will be solved and then it doesn't actually do that. Are there things that you have learned though that you think do generalize or actually are kind of particularly useful or that you maybe unlearned that have been particularly useful? Especially you had a longer career working in biotech and aerospace and at various size of companies before you eventually start your own company and you're in the thick of it now. Are there any things that you think like, yeah, most of that is not real. But this feels like it actually is something that is true and generalizes and that I can sort of share with people in the audience who might be considering starting hard tech companies.