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.
00:39:22 · Nato Saichek
[00:39:22] S1: You have to be willing to commit really hard and work really hard. Especially early on. The... And you have to be willing to get kicked in the teeth. Especially if you're on the fundraising side. I mean I I think this is part of the reason to have two people at a company and not be a solo founder, is because if you're a solo founder, don't have anyone to complain to. You don't have anyone to commiserate with. Like no one, you know, I I mean, I guess maybe here, you've got a bunch This of is actually probably a fantastic environment and I wish maybe we had had, you know, a cohort of other, you know, co startups to, commiserate with. I mean, it's really hard to shoulder the pressures. And especially once you have a few employees, and suddenly here's people who you convince them to join you on this journey, and now they are dependent on you. And like, if you fail to raise money, they're out of a job. Like if I miss some technical detail and and I've taken us down a wrong track, then our team is is SOL. And you know, we're gonna die. So I think you have to be able to handle that pressure without burdening the other people at the company with it. Again, maybe if it's your... If you're founding it, your co founder, that's a reasonable person where you can commiserate with them. But know, you you can't complain to your employees that like your job is hard. Like, you know, or something like that. And people who aren't in the startup scene, and you know, like, you know what? I have a wife, and while she is supportive, like, there's a there's a certain amount of like like, she doesn't she isn't a startup co founder. You know, I can lean on her in some ways, but like, but she's not in the in the thick of it and doesn't have the the same pressure. She has different pressures. Know, we have a three year old. So she has all kinds of different other pressures. But it's a it's a different thing. You know, the... There... People aren't gonna understand what you're doing and what's going on and, it can be it can be lonely and it can be stressful. And it can be, you know, it's a it's not it's not glamorous in a lot of ways. Like, if you're doing it right, I think, it's not glamorous. At least not not early on because, like, there's no glamor to just like staying up until 2AM. It's nice to tell the story later.
00:41:40 · Nato Saichek, Jonathan Brebner
It can feel glamorous to sit on a stage and have all these people, you know, listening, hanging off your every word. But like, but for the first three years when no one gives a crap, and you're just slogging away, and most people are saying like, well your heat shield's gonna have to be too thick and it's not gonna work so what are you doing? Yeah it's a lot of it isn't fun and so you really have to believe and have people who believe with you. [00:42:07] S0: And then every once in a while you get to hit the big red button. [00:42:10] S1: Yes. Yeah. When you... Yes. And then when you get those... Occasionally you get those little moments of victory. [00:42:16] S0: Nato, I I very much enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for joining us My pleasure. [00:42:20] S1: Here tonight and and speaking to all all the members at SPC. [00:42:23] S0: Thank you.